by Jeff Somers
The landing was a little rough, the hover doing a straight vertical deadhead drop in the rain, winds tearing at it. The Droids moved up and down the aisle reassuring us that everything was fine, that this was normal. It didn’t bother me. I’d been through worse.
From behind her, I leaned to the right and watched what I could of Marilyn Harper. Some random jiggle of her cleavage reminded me that I hadn’t been with a woman in a while, but I suppressed the thought. Too many mediocre crooks just like me had been gunned with their pants down. It was just too risky. I was convinced that she was going to mess with me. I knew she thought she recognized me from some SSF file she’d seen-lord knew I was in plenty-and she was probably thinking of ways to confirm without tipping her hand.
Without warning, she glanced over and noticed me leaning out into the aisle, and did a double take. Then she twisted around and smiled at me.
“There’s a few things in that Dawson report I wasn’t allowed to say, you know,” she said brightly. “Since you seemed interested. The goddamn SSF got a JC order to suppress, and I couldn’t put all the details on the air. The two people he beat up? One might actually still die; he’s in SSF custody and they certainly don’t give a shit about him. Both were just two-bit hoods, known around a bar called Pickering’s where all the little shitheel crooks hang out.”
I kept my face impassive. “That’s interesting.”
She kept her bright green eyes on mine. “Both reported the same thing: Dawson was trying to beat information out of them. He was looking for someone, someone they were known to associate with.”
I wanted very badly to slap her. I licked my lips. “Really? Who?”
She smiled. “Some piece-of-shit Gunner named Avery Cates. Brother Dawson told both of them he was going to find this Cates and tear him limb from limb.”
With a hollow thud, we landed in London.
XVIII
OR SOMEONE LIKE SOMEONE I’D KNOWN
10011
“Mr. Cates!” Milton-or maybe Tanner-shouted from outside the fence. “I do not much care for your friend.”
Next to her, Gatz leaned against a trashcan and waved at me subtly, a slight lift of his hand. They stood with a small group of upright citizens waiting for passengers, the two of them looking grubby and unmutual, probably the reason that a fat System Pig had taken up position a few feet away, ostensibly watching a handheld Vid. Stationed right by the gate in front of the crowd were two smiling Monks, welcoming everyone to London and asking politely if they wouldn’t want to discuss their salvation for five minutes, since next time the landing might not be so smooth.
I walked right past my lamentable partners. Tanner-some unidentifiable sense told me it was Tanner-grinned, and they followed me. I went into the nearest restroom, swept through quickly, banging stall doors in to make sure it was empty, and waited. A moment later they swaggered in. Tanner was all grins. Gatz was his usual ebullient self, and stationed himself right inside the door in case someone tried to walk in, like a good soldier.
“How’d you know to meet me here?” I demanded.
“Gatz’s buddy Marcel sent a message. Damn, you clean up nice, Mr. Cates.”
I stared at her. “So you idiots thought you’d just show up here and meet me? Shit, I thought you girls were professionals. So in case Elias fucking Moje of the SSF got a decent look at either of you he could just connect the fucking dots and just arrest us all at the gate, walk us into a Blank Room, and shoot us each in the head? Is that it?”
She stared at me, a smart-assed eyebrow raised. “Yeah, that’s exactly what we thought. Look, Cates, I recently spent two fucking hours being bossed around by Wonderboy here,” she jerked an angry thumb at Gatz, “and I haven’t slept since. I fucking dream about Wonderboy now. And as much as I hate having that in my head now for the rest of my life, we got our asses over here-in a lot less style and comfort than you did, apparently-found each other, dug up your travel itinerary, and established a headquarters in Covent Garden that rivals the world record for crappiness. Ty waved his nose in the air and we’re wired up, communications, power, video systems, a whole lab of shit I’ve never seen before, or heard of. He also scavenged some security for us-just your basic movement-triggered turret systems and a couple of steel snap-doors in case we get invaded and need to slow someone down, simple stuff, that shit’s just lying around-and Sis and I got us some transport. We did our job, okay? So climb off the bullshit wagon and let’s get back to work. The sooner I get my paycheck and get Wonderboy out of my life forever, the better, okay?”
Someone tried to walk into the bathroom, but Gatz turned, raised his glasses, and glanced at them. They went away.
I sat down on the sink. “Okay. Here’s the news: New York almost burned to the ground, Barnaby Dawson’s a Monk but I don’t think it took, because he’s beating the tar out of people and telling them he’s looking for me. And a Vid reporter recognized me on the fucking hover and might be a problem.”
“The redhead,” Gatz drawled. “I recognized her.”
“Oh, yeah.” I grinned at Gatz. “The Teutonic Fuck says hello.”
Gatz did his best to grin back, which wasn’t anything pleasant to see. “He still able to walk?”
“Yeah, but he won’t ever breathe out that nose right again.”
“Good. Teach the bastard to threaten to throw me out the window.”
“Blow each other later, okay?” Tanner said, putting her hands on the top of her head and wincing as if in sudden pain. I wondered suddenly if Milton was doing the same somewhere else, silently and maybe unconsciously mirroring her twin. “Your System Pig is a Monk? But it didn’t take? And now yet another person is trying to kill you? And we’re going to see your face on the Vids?” She threw her hands into the air. “I’m following a child. Lord, take me now. I’m ready.”
“Shut the hell up.”
A few moments of silence followed, during which someone else tried to get into the bathroom, only to run into Gatz. I ran a hand over my face and nodded. “All right. You did good. The gang’s all here, huh? A base of operations and everything. That’s great. Brother West?”
“Still with us. Sis and I are goddamned bright chicks-we snagged an AbZero freighter unit, supposedly shipping nanotech. Too cold to open up, too cold to scan effectively, the Pigs couldn’t open it. Kieth faked up the freight papers for us. Brother West traveled in comfort, and we picked him up at the hover pad easy as pie. Snagged us a brand-new hover, too. We spent a few hours going over it with a sledgehammer and a blowtorch, though, so now it looks like the original hover left over from biblical times.” She grinned. “Your ride awaits, sir! Take care not to smudge your fine duds on anything as you alight the carriage.”
The hover did look like complete crap, but ran smooth and steady. Tanner pulled up outside what appeared to be a completely respectable office building in a well-kept if largely abandoned business block, the sort of empty area with brand-new buildings that spoke of a recent cleanup of riot damage-which was more than you could say of New York, which had let most of its ruined areas rot.
“Haymerle Road!” she shouted. “End of the line.”
I leaned forward. “This is where we’re set up? Looks a bit too active for my liking.”
She nodded. “Sure, that’s what we all said. But Kieth insisted. Said that these office buildings get sealed up when no tenants are around, left in hibernation. No one comes around and checks on ’em because their security is handled by Droids connected to a private network, or some shit. Anyway, he got us in-no big deal, three-year-old tech at best-and then Ty waved his nose at the network and took over. It’s an old Droid factory. When the owners check its status, it looks like a typical day, complete with faked security footage.” She grinned. “Meanwhile we got the Droids doing chores for us. I tell you, Cates, that Kieth is a genius.”
We got out and I looked around. If you put a few hundred people in the streets it would have looked like some of the more prosperous sections of New York. I felt naked
without people pushing and shoving at me, their dirty hands on me. Our flight over had revealed London to be half-empty, a dying city bereft of citizens. I wondered if the presence of the main hive of the Electric Church had anything to do with that.
“Where’s the Abbey from here?”
She waved her hand northward. “See the spike?”
I saw, in the distance, a tall towerlike structure with a square top, a round, charred disc set in the middle. The whole thing was blackened from fire, sticking up over the very tops of the buildings on the horizon like a baleful reminder of the Riots.
“I’ll get this off the street,” Tanner said from within the hover. “Go on in with Wonderboy there. I’m sure Kieth can’t wait to fill you in.”
I followed Gatz to the door, which whisked open as we reached it. A faceless white and black Droid-humanoid torso on top of a wheeled chassis-cocked its head and waved us in.
“Come in, come in!” its synthetic voice chimed. “Welcome to the House of Kieth. Mr. Kieth is currently in the Assembly Room.”
I glanced at Gatz. He shrugged as he followed the Droid in. “Kieth’s got a weird sense of humor,” he growled.
Inside, the building was dusty and abandoned, wires hanging out of the walls and holes gouged into the concrete where machinery used to be. A lot of factories and offices stood empty everywhere; landlords usually set up Droid armies like this to keep squatters and crooks out. The evidence of Kieth’s work was everywhere: I could see the guns mounted quick-and-dirty on the walls, the steel plates ready to slam down and cut off any route into the building at the touch of a remote. I’d seen field setups in my day, and this one struck me as impressively complete and solid-looking, considering our resources and the time frame. The Droid led us along narrow corridors lit by cheap make-you-squint ambient lighting until we emerged into a huge cavern empty except for the small camp of equipment and too-bright floodlights set up at the far end like stark metal trees.
“Mr. Kieth! Authorized visitors! Mr. Kieth! Authorized visitors!”
Ty Kieth’s bald head appeared over the rim of a large back cube, connected to smaller black cubes by endless cables. “Cates! Ty is glad to see you’re alive!”
“Glad to find I was on the entrance list for the House of Kieth,” I drawled. “Get a Vid in here, okay? We need to know what’s going on.” As we approached, I realized that one of the pieces of equipment was the Monk, standing perfectly still in the focus of the lights. Its face had been removed, and its torso remained exposed. “Is it… functional?”
Kieth glanced at it. “Sure is. We’ve been doing a lot of work with Brother West, Cates. I think you’re going to be amazed.” He glanced around. “Nice digs, eh? Between Ty and the Twins, we’ve rewired this whole thing and the suits that own this place don’t know a damn thing! Fully shielded: We could set the place on fire and the SSF satellites wouldn’t know it for days. There are five Droids, by the way. Ty calls them Bob. Bob One, Bob Two, like that. This is where they used to assemble Droids. You can see where the lines used to be.”
I walked up to Brother West and stood in front of him. “What’s up with him?”
Kieth sprang into animation, jumping up, wiping his hands on a rag, and running over to one of the black boxes. “He’s fine, Mr. Cates, just fine. Ty’s had a lot of time to dig around in there. Found the behavioral modification chip, learned how to selectively disable it. Want to see?”
I nodded. “Very much.”
Although the back of its skull still looked normal enough, from the front the Monk looked totally inhuman, a mass of wires and boards for a face with two delicate cameras where the eyes should be. It stood ramrod straight. I wondered who West had been. The Electric Church seemed to draw most of its converts from the lower classes, criminals and the working destitute. West might have been someone I’d known, or someone like someone I’d known. I wondered if he’d gotten what he wanted. Or deserved.
Kieth fiddled with his equipment and began punching into a small keyboard. “All right,” he said, “meet Mr. West.”
The Monk spasmed, twitched, and fell to its knees with a shriek. Its hands came up and began pounding on its skull violently.
“Let me out,” it said, its voice perfectly modulated and sounding strangely reasonable. As it continued to speak, the reasonable tone gave way to increasing volume and a ragged quality that made my skin crawl. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
I reached for my gun. It wasn’t there. I’d had to chuck it to get on the hover.
“It’s okay!” Kieth shouted over the Monk’s din. “It can’t activate its weapons.” He paused to stare at the Monk with me. “This is Mr. West, Cates. This is what’s going on inside his brain right now. After some analysis, Ty doesn’t believe his mental operations are damaged, he simply believes being a Monk is too much to process. In short, the mod chip eliminates free will, Mr. Cates, but once it is removed there’s a viable person in there. It’s just a viable person who’s been driven mad by the process, and who knows how many months or years of being enslaved.”
“Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-”
I flinched away from it. “Goddamn it, Kieth, can’t you shut it up? I get the point.”
He nodded, but didn’t move. “Mr. Gatz?”
I glanced sharply at Kev, who unfolded himself and stepped forward, stiff and ponderous. “Kev? What the fuck?”
Kieth held up a hand. “Watch.”
Kev stepped in front of me and removed his glasses. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the Monk calmed, until it was completely silent, its arms raised, its body stiff and kneeling. After a few more seconds, it climbed to its feet again and resumed attention.
“Kev can Push a Monk?”
Kieth nodded slowly. “It appears that the only requirement for Mr. Gatz’s ability is a human brain. And proximity.”
I blinked. “But it doesn’t have eyes.”
“Ty’s belief is that Mr. Gatz uses the eye-to-eye contact as a focus. It isn’t physically required.”
Gatz spoke slowly. “I noticed it first in Newark. When the Monk showed up, I was so fucking terrified I started Pushing without even realizing it. And I could swear for a second I almost had that Monk by the short hairs, that it hesitated because I was Pushing it.” He glanced back at me with naked eyes and I flinched. “Wanna talk to Mr. West?”
I nodded, my brain disconnected from the rest of me by the stress of processing all of this new information-as if there wasn’t sufficient wattage left to manage anything else. After a moment I realized that my hands were rubbing themselves nervously together. I had to concentrate to stop it.
Gatz nodded, looked at the Monk. “Say something, West.”
The Monk twitched again, and then turned its head to look in my direction. I had the eerie feeling of being stared at by something eyeless. It wiggled a little, as if losing its balance, and then nodded its head.
“For God’s sake,” it said, its voice terribly perfect, smooth and on-pitch, still processed by whatever hardware was built into its artificial skull. “Kill me. Kill me now. I beg of you.”
XIX
WHY AM I STILL ALIVE?
00000
I stepped into the gutted kitchen area, where Milton and Tanner had scrounged a few crates together into a makeshift table and stored our meager food supplies. Food was hard to come by. Mostly, we had nutrient tablets, the kind they handed out now and then in New York when local aristocrats were moved to keep the peasant population alive for a few more weeks, for whatever obscure reasons really rich people had. The tablets kept you going, but left hunger gnawing at you. It was like starving to death forever.
Milton sat on some boxes, taking a pull from a gleaming flask. She glanced up at me from her spot at the crates and grinned. “Cheerful fucker, isn’t he?”
I gestured at the bottle she was drinking from. “Give me a blast.”
She hand
ed it over. “Gearing up for the interrogation, eh? That’s what we figured you’d do.”
I nodded, sitting down on a box and taking a long swallow of liquor. It tasted like gasoline. I held it in by sheer will and after a moment the burning was replaced by warmth and I risked a second swallow before handing it back. “Kieth can’t guarantee West’s brain will last very long once it’s unfettered from the mod chip. Gatz seems to be able to force lucidity onto it, but who knows how long he’ll be able to manage. We need information.” I coughed. “Someone will need to sit in and take notes. Kev’s illiterate, I think, and Ty will be busy, so that leaves you or your sister.”
She winked. “Way ahead of you, chief. Why do you think I’m in here getting drunk? It’s like talking to a ghost.”
I stared at the rough wood of the crates. “You believe in shit like that?”
She slid the bottle in front of me, and I took another drink. It was starting to taste better. “Like ghosts? Like a soul?” Milton’s voice disappeared under the edge of the crate as she stretched out on the floor. “Sure I do, Mr. Cates. How can you not? All those prophecies are coming true.”
I swallowed wrong and had to cough to clear my windpipe. “Prophecies?”
“Fucking pagan.” She sighed. “Revelations. Catholic dogma. Most religions have something similar. Isn’t it obvious? We’re in the End Times.”
I stared at the bottle. Milton’s hand appeared over the edge of the crate and waved around lazily until I handed it back.
“Think about it, Cates. The dead are walking the Earth inside those air-cooled Monk bodies. You can’t get a doctor to look at you or buy something high-end unless you have one of those chips under your scalp. I’m telling you, it’s near over.”
I stood up. “Well then, we have nothing more to worry about.”
“Hey, Cates?”
“Yeah?”
“Make me a promise. I know we aren’t friends or anything, but promise me something human to human. Promise me you’ll blow my brains out before letting them Monk me. And my sister. Okay?”
