by Alex Lamb
Den and the others took them to a line of concrete sheds at the edge of the dome. Mark held his breath as Kal bent over him with a humming mono-knife and stripped the ship-suit from his body. Den did the same to the others.
Then Den took out a box from the cart and pulled something like a bulky silver ski-mask from it. He held it up close to the nearest shed until lights on the mask’s surface began to wink. Mark’s eyes went wide. He knew what he was looking at. He’d worn one plenty of times during interface check-ups. It was a neuromap helmet, used to monitor brain function.
‘No!’ he screamed.
He’d already guessed what they had in mind. They didn’t want to view his brain. They wanted to change it. Venetia had been right. The sects had been dabbling in brainwashing after all. Suddenly he had a much better idea of what had scared him about Massimo’s servants. Den slipped the helmet over Venetia’s head.
Mark pulled madly against his restraints, twisting on the ground. ‘No fucking way!’
Zoe screamed like a banshee. They held her down while they forced a helmet onto her.
Then they came for Mark. As Kal leaned down to hold him still, Mark ramped his strength and kicked up with his bound feet. Kal narrowly avoided a knee to the face as Mark’s feet clanged off his suit’s frame. A hydraulic line snapped under the force of the kick and Kal’s suit started emitting warning chimes. He backed off.
Den came at Mark carefully.
‘Don’t you fucking touch me with that thing!’ Mark warned.
Den regarded him with disappointment. ‘It just the box,’ he said. ‘I know you scared, but everyone go in there sometimes. Fight it and you only make it worse.’ He gestured to the others. ‘Boys?’
They pounced on him at once. Mark twisted and kicked with every ounce of strength he had, but clutched in exosuit grippers he didn’t stand a chance. They dragged the helmet onto his head, past his snapping teeth, and heat-sealed it tight.
‘Try to think about God, and what you done wrong,’ said Den, with something almost like kindness in his eyes. ‘That way it hurt less.’
Then, one at a time, Mark and his friends were shoved unceremoniously into the sheds, one per prisoner.
Mark found himself dumped onto the floor of a padded chamber barely tall enough to stand in. The ceiling glowed with soft pink light. The air had an antiseptic tang. A small shrine built around an old-fashioned video screen occupied one end. As the door clicked shut behind him, Mark’s bindings snapped open.
He immediately started tearing at the helmet but it proved far sturdier than his own flesh. The only way he’d get it off was with a knife. He leapt to his feet and tried the door. They’d locked it, of course. Even with all of his strength, he couldn’t get it to budge. He bloodied his knuckles trying.
‘Face the shrine and adopt the prayer position,’ said a flat feminine voice from the ceiling.
Instead, Mark threw himself at the local network again. If there was a SAP running this box, maybe he could reach it. But the box had been well shielded and the helmet didn’t help. Mark strained to find a link to the processors he knew had to be out there. Instead, there was just an overwhelming jangle of non-standard traffic.
Pain filled his body again. He juddered to the floor, shrieking.
‘Face the shrine and adopt the prayer position. You will not be warned again.’
A demonstration image appeared on the shrine’s screen showing the approved posture, along with a countdown.
Mark’s hands crunched into fists. He didn’t want to give in. On the other hand, he’d achieve nothing by having his mind fried by pain. He’d die of neural overload before he could mount any kind of an escape. With anger and panic burning white hot inside him, he knelt.
A drawer in the shrine slid open, revealing a small white disc.
‘Consume the penitence wafer,’ said the shrine.
Mark regarded the object before him with terror. Another flash of pain lashed his bare skin. Then another. He knew all of Will’s stories backwards. He knew what enforced conditioning could be like.
‘Fuck you!’ he screamed, and heard Nid laughing outside.
Pain drowned him again.
‘Consume the penitence wafer or you will die.’
Mark ramped his designer metabolism to its maximum setting and loaded every analytical program he had. Depending on what was in the wafer, they might not help much. With a reluctance that verged on nausea, he picked up the wafer and put it in his mouth. His interface immediately lit up with drug warnings.
The shrine screen showed the scowling eyes of the Prophet Sanchez.
‘Repent!’ the shrine told him in Sanchez’s voice.
Then the helmet turned on.
16.3: WILL
Despite the gnawing, irrepressible pain in his side, Will picked up Ann’s bleeding body and carried her. He staggered back across the tunnel, positioned her over one shoulder and tried to lift her up towards the alcove high above. By that time Ann had fallen unconscious. Gaining purchase on the slick wall while carrying her dead weight was effectively impossible. He looked up at the hole just a couple of metres above his head and felt like crying.
He shut his eyes, dived into his sensorium and surveyed his smart-cells again. He had the strength for one more jump, but the microbial response would exhaust his reserves at a stroke.
Will steeled himself and instructed his body to manufacture another round of barricades, this time designed to instantly collapse the moment he’d made his leap. Hopefully that would save him from the worst of the repercussions.
He felt his body change as the false strength of his augmentations swelled up inside him. He leapt.
Will seized the edge of the hole with one hand and tossed Ann’s limp body inside with the other. The act lost him his grip on the ledge. He scrabbled for a moment, fingernails scraping on the bone-like wall before his other hand managed to grab on. With his body screaming for rest and burning up from the effects of the jump, he dragged himself over the edge and fell into the muck beyond.
He found himself in a kind of armpit-space where two tunnels partially joined. He was waist-deep in acrid-smelling fluid. Ann lay on the other side where the wall curved up, her filth-spattered face out of the water, thank Gal. She looked still and drawn, but he could see her chest rising and falling slightly with shallow, desperate breaths.
Will waded through the slime towards her and hated how vulnerable he felt. He was sick with self-rage. If he’d just shown her an ounce more trust when it had mattered. If only he’d moved a little bit faster. He held her out of the water with trembling arms to examine the wound in her gut.
It looked awful. He couldn’t tell damage from the bullet from alien infection. He pressed one hand against her flesh, trying to form a dressing out of smart-cells. His body barely responded. He needed more strength. He lay there with her, trying to gather the pitiful remains of his body’s reserves, but he’d scraped the barrel once already. There was nothing he could give without killing himself.
He feebly tried to ward off the planet’s never-ending assault, or at least create some kind of diversion. As he did so, another group of soldiers arrived below. He could hear them down there talking.
‘That’s right,’ said one. ‘Four dead. He killed them all. And the ATVs are compromised. We had to fry them on the way in. But there’s a ton of blood down here. They have to be nearby.’
Will gave thanks for the fact that at least most of the foliage was red. It’d hide their route until someone noticed the bloodstains smeared outside their hiding place.
‘We need to hurry,’ said another. ‘There’s too much Nem activity. If we can’t find them in five, we have to get out. Nesser says there are drones landing in the ocean, homing in on Monet’s beacon. She has to take the lifter up any minute.’
They kept talking but Will was distracted by Ann’s b
reathing. She’d started wheezing horribly. He bent to examine her again but couldn’t even muster the strength for a cellular assay. She was dying from the bullet that had been meant for him. The one he shouldn’t have gone down there to take in the first place.
He mustered another pathetic attempt to heal her, this time extending some simple filaments into her wound, but the attempt left him lightheaded. Fighting the planet’s nullifying effect made his stomach roil. He retched. The world blurred into the mud.
The sound of fresh gunshots brought him back to consciousness. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d passed out. A new voice sounded up from below.
‘Hold your fire!’ it said. The voice sounded jubilant, like an advertisement for something. ‘We come in peace. Step out where we can see you and prepare to accept joy into your hearts.’
A whiff of alien technology carried to him on the breeze, stirring his smart-cells back into sluggish action. The newcomer smelled almost like the planet around him, but it wasn’t the same. There was something eerily familiar about this new breed, something distorted. Will shuddered as a flash of synaesthetic insight bloomed from his failing interface – grinning faces, twisted and melted, and hungry, outstretched hands.
Will recoiled. The approaching Nems smelled weirdly of people. They’d already absorbed some essence of humanity at the subcellular level. He wondered if everything they’d struggled to do had been too late. Maybe the Nems had already won.
He drifted back into the blur of fever but explosions and gunfire kept him awake. The sounds of shooting and screaming interrupted his waking dreams like jags of auditory lightning. Meanwhile, he could feel Ann dying in his arms, just as Gustav had. He barely knew Ann Ludik, but the thought of losing her was unbearable. Couldn’t he do anything?
All the power he’d been handed – was it useful for nothing except smashing and killing things? He hadn’t saved Earth. He hadn’t saved Mark. And now he couldn’t even save the woman who’d risked her life for him. What was the point of being alive if he couldn’t even protect her?
A sudden stab of terrible pain doubled Will over, bringing with it another pulse of unwelcome knowledge. His endless attempts to interfere with Ann’s tissues had finally convinced the life around him that he constituted an invasive foreign agent. Now they weren’t so much investigating him as taking him apart in earnest.
Will gritted his teeth. He’d fucked it up and now he was finished. As he watched, his own skin started to discolour in the water. The puddle he lay in had to be full of trillions of bacteria. They’d decided to eat him alive, and the feast had started.
16.4: MARK
The box jangled Mark with infrasonics and randomised bursts of despair-inducing sound. Pain crackled down from the ceiling at irregular intervals. The box flashed erratically full of searing, intolerable light like the inside of a sun. And all the while, hallucinogens in the air tore away at the edges of his reality, turning the physical torment into nightmares.
‘Repent,’ the shrine told him, ‘and your suffering will be lessened.’
Mark raged at the walls, spitting every kind of curse he knew. In between the jags of suffering, he ripped at the joins on the ceiling and around the edges of the shrine. Every single surface in the box had been proofed against even superhuman acts of desperation. His fingers bled.
‘Repent! Regret grants you mercy!’
‘Fuck you!’ said Mark.
The box had been perfectly engineered to reduce a person to a quivering, humbled wreck, but Mark had his sensorium, and a metabolism to dull the effects, so he kept fighting.
‘The only thing I regret,’ he yelled at the walls, ‘is coming here to save you stupid fuckers!’
As it turned out, the penitence box wasn’t fussy. The simple mention of the word ‘regret’ turned the light in the room a cool blue. His skin tingled suddenly as a breath of refreshing, drug-laden air brushed across it. Pain morphed into pleasure, and something bloomed inside his head like a light turning on. Mark groaned in relief.
‘Good,’ said the box. ‘You must repent. Share your regrets with the Lord. Beg for his mercy and he will deliver it. We will show you how to love him.’
Mark sucked air as the reality of his situation set in. He’d downloaded the research, of course, like all roboteers. When you had as much hardware in your head as he did, you followed neuroscience like normal people tracked their investments. Teams on Esalen had put plenty of work into synthesising religious experiences prior to the war – back before the High Church and the treaties. The science was simple: jangle the temporal lobes just right and a person’s sense of self started to fall away. A certain kind of religious experience followed – one that encouraged willing service to a greater goal. The Truist High Church had discovered how to select those goals. They were going to make him faithful whether he liked it or not.
‘I regret that you’re a stupid fucking machine,’ he snarled.
The pain came back, worse than ever.
‘Only the truth can set you free,’ said the machine. ‘The Lord can see your lies. Repent honestly and you shall be guided towards the true faith.’
The helmet could recognise attempts at evasion. Of course it could. They were probably also optimising his pain response to break him down faster. He didn’t stand a chance. He wished he had fewer regrets. He clamped his mouth shut but the pain kept coming.
Mark crouched in the box as it hammered on his nerves. He found himself crying and clawing madly at his own skin. That had to be down to the drug cocktail, didn’t it? He pushed his metabolism harder, urging it to purge the poisons they’d dumped into his system. When he started getting warnings from his liver, he simply pissed toxins onto the floor where they sank into the astringent matting.
Will’s terrible stories kept running round inside his head. They’d put a thing in Will’s skull to make him obey and forced him to watch while his friends were executed. This was nothing by contrast. What must Will have felt?
He’d broken, Mark realised. Will must have simply snapped, because Mark could feel himself pushing up against that limit himself. It was like looking over a precipice at a bottomless drop beyond. No wonder Will spent so much of the time freaked out or angry. He’d never fully recovered.
If Mark didn’t want to end up that way he needed a better solution, and fast. Resisting the machine any longer would just ablate his identity like the heat-shield on a shuttle, which was exactly what they wanted.
Okay, he thought. If they were going to make him selfless, he’d make damned sure it was on his terms. He reached into his sensorium and pulled up the footage of the Tiwanaku Event and started playing it on a loop with the interior acuity ramped to maximum. He watched people die over and over again.
‘I regret that I wasn’t there to save those people,’ he told the box. ‘I’ll never let that happen again.’
The box felt his grief and rewarded him.
With ships burning behind his eyes, Mark reached into the deep well of his own guilt and flopped out everything he found for his mind’s eye to feast on. If he was going to be remade, then let it be as a living antidote for the Nemesis machines and everything Sam had planned for them.
‘I let Venetia and Zoe get captured,’ he announced. ‘I hate that. I should have done better.’
They both lacked his metabolic advantage, and he’d been the one who brought them to this point. Zoe might have another trick up her sleeve, but Venetia, as far as he knew, had none. He was responsible for them and had failed to deliver.
‘Beg God for forgiveness,’ the shrine told him as it rewarded him. ‘Direct your prayers at God.’
‘Fixing this shit is God,’ said Mark, conviction building inside him like a storm. ‘I will believe and I will save the world.’
He took his rage at the Fleet, and every gram of injustice he’d ever felt, and squeezed his fury into that one single idea
.
‘I will be a weapon in my own god’s hands!’ he bellowed at the shrine. It didn’t make a shred of sense and he didn’t care.
He could use his interface, he realised. With his power to tweak his own metabolism, he had the ability to modify the blood flow through his own brain. The helmet couldn’t beat him. So long as he flooded himself with genuine regret, it would have no idea what was prayer and what was revenge.
‘Will Monet gave me this job,’ he shouted, ‘and I’ve been doing shitty-ass work. I was so caught up in my own pain that I failed to see the enemy right in front of me. Fuck me, I won’t be doing that again. Next time I see Sam, I’m going to rip the fucking eyes out of his head.’
‘Good,’ said the shrine. ‘Pray for forgiveness!’
His temporal lobes buzzed. A sense of openness and totality swelled in him like a wind through his soul. As Mark yelled out his failures, greatness grew inside him. He felt himself genuinely changing. He did regret who he’d been. He was becoming a servant, all right. A servant to his own furious, epic cause.
If he ever got out of here, things would be different. There’d be no more hoping that his fellow Earthers would magically turn out to be decent just because they shared a birth-world with him. There’d be no more playing by Fleet rules. They’d been screwing him over since before the court case and that was long enough. But most of all, there’d be no wallowing. Mark felt his own pain dwindling to irrelevance. If they ever let him out of the box, they’d better know who they were fucking with, because Mark wasn’t afraid of them any more. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
Hell, why wait to be released? He reached for Will’s hackpack again while the emotions thundered through him and let the bewildering array of options bloom in front of him.
‘I regret not looking at this stuff before,’ he said quietly.
‘Good,’ said the shrine. ‘That’s right!’
Somewhere in here would be a tool that could unpack all that odd system traffic. Mark no longer doubted that he’d find it.
