by R. Z. Held
“Enraged? I don’t think all of Tsuga cares quite that much about what happens to me. The research can go on without me, after all.” Pyrus, on the other hand, might well be tearing himself apart right now, she was sure of that, but she couldn’t do a thing about it other than add it to the box stuffed full of things she couldn’t allow herself to think about or she’d break down. “And you—” Genevieve’s mouth continued on without her brain, and she cut herself off. There was no call to be cruel.
“No one is going to be sad I’m gone?” Carex waved away an apology impatiently. “I said it, not you. It’s not about popularity, it’s the fact that of everyone in that dumping ground, I toed the fucking line. Every time.” He stabbed a fingertip into the table. “And look where it got me.”
For a moment, just a flash, Genevieve thought she heard real hurt in his voice. She reached out to put her hand over his, but his hand wasn’t there when hers arrived, and he was looking away, glower in place.
He cleared his throat. “In any case, all this means we get to settle in and wait, let the wheels of bureaucracy grind onward. No point trying to escape in Headquarters where every five meters there’s another Install who could stop us with one hand tied behind their back, in our current state.”
Which is what he would have to say, out loud. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t right. Any typical escape attempt seemed fairly doomed to failure to Genevieve as well.
Except for the very atypical option. She had all the burnout process data in her local storage—too dangerous to keep them anywhere else—and should she decide to use it, all it would take would be a touch on an Install guard. Easy.
The decision, though. That was the hard part.
Genevieve muttered an acknowledgment of Carex’s summation of their situation, hoping she seemed to be discouraged, not plotting, and dragged back to the bed. Silence fell and swallowed her whole and sleep, frustratingly, refused to drag her away from it.
Should she wait? Pyrus would be doing everything he could from the outside. There was no conspiracy to find; surely she and Carex would become more and more politically awkward as no evidence of wrongdoing was discovered.
Unless they turned up evidence of the burnout trials, decided it was a weapon, and charged them with that. Then her chance to use it would be gone for good. Or else their long-term solution to “politically awkward” would turn out to be “quietly execute.” It seemed much more Pax Romana style.
So she could inflict the burnout process on a guard. Depending on who opened a channel to the afflicted Install, and onwards from there, she might get half of Headquarters. Reasonable odds for getting out of here, if.
If she was willing to consign so many people to such pain, such a ripping away of what they’d come to accept as their selves, it would drive them to suicide after.
Genevieve curled in on her knees, even that much pressure not enough to keep back the tears brimming at the edges of her closed eyes. Nine years ago, she’d committed to that abstract when she walked into Tsuga Security with a virus ready to deploy. But now she loved a Pax Romana. She’d done good, she had to believe that, making the nanites less dangerous, even if it had been good done in the service of the empire.
Weight settled onto the bed beside her. Genevieve started to uncurl to scoot over and grant Carex what room she could, but there was a touch at her hip instead, encouraging her to tuck close.
Her eyes popped open, but it was still Carex here with her, his features still tight with his perpetual anger. Genevieve maintained their current distance, dashed away a few last refracting droplets from her eyes, and tried to read his motives. “Carex…”
He sighed. “I know you and Pyrus are exclusive.” Unusual, around Tsuga. Denied the ability to leave and settle down, a lot of the ex-soldiers liked to keep things casual, not just Eriope.
“Well, mostly.” Though the exceptions so far had involved inviting a guest to join them both, not experiences apart. Genevieve shook her head. That was moot; she and Carex were both so weak they couldn’t sit up for more than the space of a meal, she wasn’t worried about this being sexual—it was the fact that comfort was being offered at all that confused her. “You’ve never been…kind. I don’t understand. You’re a badass ex-soldier, whatever your military has done to you since. I’m a civilian who got so scared I wet myself.”
“Pyrus and I were as good as brothers, at one point. He was the kind one. I was the one who made sure anyone who fucked with us, regretted it. As a partnership, it used to work well. Until he was the one who needed kindness.” Carex rested his forehead against her shoulder, and Genevieve let her instincts guide her. She tucked herself against his chest, and he found a place to fit his arm along her hip, away from her back. It struck her that perhaps he offered comfort because he didn’t know how to request it for himself.
“So you and Pyrus served in the same unit?” Genevieve asked into his chest. As long as he wanted to talk, she was glad not to be alone with her thoughts and the decision to make.
“Yeah. Poverty brought us together.” Carex laughed, low. The vibrations in his chest were thinner than the rich sound Pyrus made from this distance. “Him, starving with his father in some rat-infested hole on a core planet, and me, starving with my older sister in some rat-infested hole on a newly occupied planet. His mother died in an industrial accident, my parents died in prison, but somehow we ended up in the exact same damn place. Seemed like a good idea to join up and send money home.”
That was more than she’d heard about Carex’s background in nine years. She knew a few details about what had precipitated his estrangement from Pyrus, from Pyrus’s side, and it was common knowledge that those parents who had died in prison had been resistance fighters branded terrorists by the Pax Romana as they tightened their hold on his planet, but otherwise he’d been a loyal, Pax-Romana-line-toeing blank.
“I had an older sister.” Which would be in the public record at home, so Genevieve judged it safe to say out loud, in the name of a little reciprocal trust. “Died fighting at the front. My younger brother, though, he’s still—was still alive when I had to leave. He was just starting med school when the war started, so they rushed him through.”
The silence this time was more comfortable, though Genevieve still couldn’t drift off. If only they had some other choice, some other way to escape. Carex might even have some ideas, but he couldn’t share them out loud. If only they still had private channels, with no one around to spy on them.
If only…
Experimentally, Genevieve tried to open one of those channels. The block made her system buzz in a way that had nothing to do with an actual sound but still made her teeth ache. Try, short buzz. Try, longer buzz. Short, long. There was some kind of code specifically for that, but she didn’t have it loaded locally so she used binary instead. Even if he decoded the long and short the wrong way, his system could flip it back easily enough.
HELLO
In the middle of the second “L,” Carex growled. “Stop that!”
“If I could just break through,” Genevieve whined, in case they were monitoring the activity, as well as to explain his objection. Come on. She finished out her word and waited. If Carex would just use his system to process it—if he had enough juice for even that simple operation—
His fingers tightened on the sheet over her hip to bruising, then relaxed. Her system started buzzing in return. At first it was just a muddle, his attempts coming too fast for her system to accurately measure their duration. After some trial and error he throttled himself back to excruciatingly slow. Even if they chose their words carefully, this was going to take all day. Which they had to spare, she supposed.
Her system logged the channel attempts until he paused for several breaths, then she let it change it into text for her to read.
FUCK
Genevieve swallowed a laugh that would have no visible antecedent to observers. She took a beat to compose her question in the fewest possible words.
YES. SHOULD HAVE KEPT YOUR DAMN VIRUS
It wasn’t that Carex’s words made up her mind, precisely. It felt more to Genevieve like they uncovered what she’d already decided, deep down. She must have already decided it, after all, because something had made her warn Pyrus. The burnout shouldn’t spread beyond Headquarters, but even if it did, Pyrus would have warned people. That was the best she could do.
HAVE A CHANCE FROM RESEARCH. NEED TO ANTIDOTE YOU
That wasn’t technically true, but she judged greater precision wasn’t worth the time it would take to explain. The concept was the same. She could prime his system not to accept the signal, should he receive it, same as everyone in the research group had done to their own systems after the burnout first jumped. She had no idea if it was 100% effective, but it was better than not opening any channels and hoping. Which reminded her, he should do that as well.
TO BE SAFE, NO COMS
No answer came to either comment, which Genevieve took as permission. When she was finished with Carex’s system, she delicately extracted the code she needed from her own system and bumped its wish to spread, just a little. Anxiety kept her awake when dealing with the actual burnout data, but once she’d folded them away again and turned to obsessively checking the completed patch on his system and in her own from all angles, the sleep she was feigning for observers caught her up once more.
***
Of course, with her decision made, days dragged on and on without a chance to do a thing about it. No one entered, and even when someone did, Genevieve wouldn’t necessarily be able to take advantage of it. If she knocked out any Installs who came in after locking the door behind themselves, she and Carex would be no farther ahead.
Around the end of the third day, she caught herself on the edge of screaming at Carex not to be silent so fucking pointedly at her. She paced a few more circuits of the room, realized that it was very possible Carex was close to screaming at her to stop pacing, and burst into hysterical giggles. She bent over to try to hold them in, which she found was a bad idea the moment her back flexed. The burst of pain before she blocked it cleared her head a little. Carex didn’t even glance at her. Perhaps he understood what had created the outburst all too well.
Faint voices, on the other side of the door. Their presumably Install guards obviously would use private channels, so at least this was something outside of the norm. Two Installs entered, a man and a woman, her the more solid of the two. They herded Genevieve and Carex back toward the far corner, no weapons even necessary. The way the woman held her hands wide and open at Carex made Genevieve think she would welcome mixing it up.
A non-Install followed them, though she was in uniform—an unalt, Genevieve supposed. She had what looked like the most supple skin money could buy, but she was one of those people age had carved hard, rather than softening to compromise or negotiation. Genevieve had never bothered to learn Pax Romana insignia, living among ex-soldiers who were practically allergic to it, but she presumed this was someone high up. “General,” Carex greeted, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “Took your sweet time.”
The general paused in the doorway to stare him down or quash him with her field of pure intimidation, Genevieve didn’t much care, it was the chance she needed. No way they’d be able to fight past, that was clear for anyone to see, not weakened with two Installs inside, and at least one more on the other side of the open door. She summoned her earlier hysteria to her voice and pushed up against the male Install before her. “General, we didn’t do anything wrong. You have to believe me.”
He held her back, lips thin, and her hand touched his. Skin to skin. Signal sent.
First, the harbinger: a phantom taste of sweet chili sauce, as Pyrus had once helped her system taste, soon after they met. He’d been delighted when it made her smile. Later, it had become a game, something one of her researchers had figured out he could do to scent and scent-based taste early in their experimentation, touching off a prank war that left them all smelling old fish for two days straight. The female Install showed no reaction, worrying her, but the man licked his lips distractedly as he shoved her back.
But she’d already sent the real signal, close on the heels of the first. Spin up, she told the nanites, in terms it had taken all these years to learn. Run hot like your host is dying, and keep running to save him. Run hot, run hot until there’s no energy left.
Burn out.
He dropped. The female Install jerked for Carex instead of for her partner, but before she completed the movement, she was down too, boneless and sprawled. A breath of frozen surprise for them all from the general, as another thud came from the doorway.
Then the screaming started.
The Installs screamed as if burning alive, as if acid had replaced the blood in their veins. They thrashed with it, with the sheer animal shriek of it. Genevieve had thought herself prepared, but their volunteers had had pain blocks in place from the start. Blocks that had broken down soon enough, but they hadn’t started here, here where the torture was already inhuman and it had just barely started.
No. She hadn’t meant—Genevieve had never meant to—
Carex moved while she was still frozen, ignoring the Installs’ guns, which wouldn’t fire without the touch of their particular systems, and lunged for the general. They grappled—Genevieve should help, she could see pain from his ribs etched across Carex’s face—but by the time she’d snatched up the man’s gun to wield the butt, he had the general in a choke hold. A wait, with her thrashing with more focus than those on the floor, an endless wait that Genevieve couldn’t stand on top of everything else until she thought maybe she’d break into sobs herself.
And the Installs had gone past screaming now to something more like a gurgling groan. She couldn’t—she’d armored her system against the signal, there must be something she could do to block them from the worst of the effects—
Carex caught her arm when she would have knelt. His breath sawed harshly, but the general was down. “Help them,” he growled at her, “by not wasting the chance their suffering has bought.” He strode for the door, apparently more than willing to drag her every step of the way out of Headquarters.
One last look, one last good look at what she had wrought, and Genevieve went with him, so he didn’t worsen his injuries struggling against her as well.
She would not forget what she had done, today.
***
She let Carex choose their ship, some sleek, fast courier or strike-force thing, she didn’t know, nor did she care. The halls of the headquarters complex, across a quad to the docks, were like some ancient, imagined hell made manifest. A chaos of screaming and pain, Installs collapsed everywhere and unalt officers shouting into coms trying to find anyone who could tell them what was happening. No blood on the gleam of plexi and plascrete across the walls, but Genevieve almost wished there had been. No true massacre if it was bloodless, but this was still a massacre.
In the ship, Carex took them out with the sublight drive, out to hyperlight range beyond the planet, but rather than engage that drive in turn, he turned away from the controls to her. Genevieve had scrunched herself in the copilot’s chair, more because guilt was a cable drawing her ever tighter in on her herself, than because her back couldn’t touch the chair without pain. Data danced over the projected view of the stars before them, systems intended for unalts a boon for Installs whose systems barely had the power to heal them, never mind offer flight controls.
“What.” Carex paused for a moment, gathering sufficient emphasis. Somewhere in the effort of escape and piloting, his face had gone rather gray. “The hell was that?”
“Failed uninstallation process.” Genevieve couldn’t look at him, then suddenly she had to look at him, will her explanation to reach him, evoke understanding when she couldn’t understand herself. “It wasn’t as bad—no, it was plenty bad in lab conditions, but I fooled myself. All the Installs in that complex, maybe on t
he planet—for any who don’t die immediately, there’s a good chance they’ll commit suicide due to the shock.”
When she ran out of breath and stumbled raggedly to a pause, Carex didn’t try to reassure her, Genevieve noticed. “We buried the results and started over. I should have deleted the data from my system at the same time. Then I wouldn’t have been tempted. People knew where we were. You said yourself, we just had to wait.”
Carex was laughing, suddenly, sawing noises not so different than how he’d panted against his injured ribs. “Buried the results…this is all a fucking tragedy in the most classical sense. You’d never have thought of using it as a weapon if they hadn’t imprisoned you for thinking of using a weapon, would you?”
When Genevieve shook her head, still stumbling over understanding what he meant about tragedy, he flung his arms wide. “We—no, the Pax Romana—did it to themselves.”
“No, I did.” Genevieve pressed her palms over her eyes because she didn’t want to see his reaction anymore, but then she could see the screaming Installs lining the hallways all the better.
“Yes, you did, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’d have been waiting until they figured out a way to make us disappear cleanly. You can self-destruct or self-medicate or whatever first-kill—or first-close-up-kill, or first-wait-that-death-didn’t-bother-me-at-all-realization—coping strategy you like best some time not now.” Carex jerked her hands from her face, fingers far too tight around her wrists. “We’re not done yet.”
