by Jeff Somers
When the lid was torn off, I didn’t realize it at first, because I was staring at the black side of the container. A thought kept racing through my brain, interrupting everything until I imagined I could see the words scrolling across my field of vision in bright red letters, flashing and jumping: Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout!
I was turned over, the sudden light stabbing down into my eyes, and Brother West’s cheerful-fucking-face filled my field of vision as it leaned over me. It was so close I kept waiting for the blast of warm breath, but of course there wasn’t any. For several long, stretched-out seconds it hovered over me, fake skin and sunglasses.
Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-
“We are inside, Mr. Cates,” West finally said, but there was something off in its voice. The digitally smoothed, eternally calm tone that all Monks used was frayed at the edges. If I’d had any control over myself, I would have studied its face. As it was, I continued to stare just off-center, over its shoulder. In my peripheral vision, Brother West appeared to vibrate, a fuzziness around its edges as if something vital had come off the rails inside it.
“I will now-” It hesitated, and suddenly jerked its head violently to one side, then back toward me. “I will now inject you with the antidote provided by-” Another violent spasm. “By-” Again. “By Mr. Kieth.”
It turned away and disappeared from my sight.
Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-
It came back, a rising wave of nerve-shredding pain, burning through everything else and leaving me a dissolved puddle with shards of glass glinting in the sudden light. Through it, like squinting through a heavy rain, I could sense my clothing being moved aside and the needle being pushed, hard, into my chest. Brother West jerked and stuttered through the whole procedure, almost dancing. I wondered, dreamily, if he was tearing my heart open, if blood was rushing out of me, if this was where I would just bleed to death, a stupid sort of death.
Its rubbery face loomed over me again. “It is done, Mr. Cates,” it said. “I wonder-” It stopped and cocked its head, as if listening to something. Then it shuddered and oriented on me again. “I wonder if you will keep your end of the bargain, Mr. Cates. I so looooongggggg long long long to die.”
It snapped back to loom over me, suddenly calm. “I wonder,” it said, the creepy calm of the Monks back in its voice. “I wonder if you would permit me to speak to you about immortality, if I may, Mr… Cates, isn’t it? It will only take a few minutes, and I would appreciate your time.”
There was a moment, a part of a second, where everything was balanced. The pain had swollen inside me until I was sure I was going to explode, just pop like a balloon, but it held steady. Brother West stood still, watching me, its face frozen in that subtle smile, all I could see. There was no noise. I still could not move.
And then the pain exploded, shattered into billions of tiny particles scattering throughout my insides, burning on and pock-marking my bones. My body stiffened, my whole existence becoming one endless cramp. I felt my heart spasm and lurch back into motion, pushing the cooling blood in my veins. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out, my lungs deflated and unwilling to move. I sat up and froze, trembling, eyes wide and staring at Brother West.
“Mr. Cates,” it said. “Let me show you an endless-”
A gunshot tore the air, and Brother West’s abdomen, so recently repaired by Ty Kieth, exploded outward in a spray of wiring and fluffy white insulation. The Monk collapsed with a strange wheezing noise. My blood felt like splinters moving through me, and I sat in a strange black metallic container, trembling and unable to move.
Heavy, deliberate footsteps approached. I was able to squeeze a trickle of air through my constricted throat. After a few more seconds, as I was slowly forcing my lungs open, hunched over and dry-heaving, a Monk entered my field of vision, stepping carefully over West. I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, but there was obviously something wrong with it: Its robes were tattered and stained, its face smudged with dirt-though it still possessed the eternally satisfied expression of all Monks.
Somehow, when it turned to me and spoke, I knew who it had once been. Shivering and still semiparalyzed, a surge of adrenaline, like fresh ice poured directly into my veins, swept through me, making me choke.
“Mr. Cates,” the thing that had once been Barnaby Dawson said, “only Monks and dead people are allowed in here. One of us is not playing by the rules.”
XXIX
MY OWN PERSONAL ANGEL OF DEATH
01001
Outside the walls of the small room, an alarm sprang into life.
Aside from the tattered and dusty robe, Barnaby Dawson looked like every other Monk I’d ever seen. Humanoid, a uniform six feet tall, dressed in black, white fake-looking skin, eyes hidden by dark glasses. His facial expression was identical to every other Monk’s-somehow a combination of amusement, concern, and arrogance, though I wasn’t sure if I really saw or imagined it. I sat shivering, finally able to curl my hands into fists and track Dawson with my eyes, but unable to do much more than that. I couldn’t lift my arms; I couldn’t imagine fighting someone, much less a digitally enhanced killing machine. I was fucked.
It still didn’t bother me.
“You’d think,” Dawson said brightly, holding his Roon on me carelessly, “that I would be grateful. You gave me immortality. I could just follow you around making note of your advancing age and wake up every day over the next few thousand years, nuclear-powered, cheered by the memory of your pathetic death. I could wait around just to watch you try to crawl, feebly, away from death.” He paused. “And that would be fun. But now you’ve gone and had a fucking inspiration, Mr. Cates. I underwent my transformation in a place just like this. So why shouldn’t you undergo a similar change?” He nodded. “Similar, but not exactly the same, eh? I’m thinking, once we have your brain out of your skull, we’ll stop there.”
My teeth chattered and I shook violently, but I was slowly regaining some control. I could look around, and I tried to keep Dawson in my line of sight while I got my bearings. I was sitting in a small, coffin-shaped skid that floated, like a hover, swaying a few feet off the ground. It was just big enough for a tall man to stretch out inside, and various LED displays blinked peacefully along its side. It was rapidly filling with my sweat.
The room was small and Spartan; bare concrete walls, a single metal table lit by an overhead bank of harsh, white lights, and a wheeled metal table bearing three motorized surgical tools, clean and painful-looking. Without knowing why, I had an impression of being underground-a dampness in the air, a sense of weight hanging over me.
Dawson leaped up onto the table and sat with legs spread and shoulders slumped, a creepy, human posture that looked bizarre and out of place on his Monk body. He began swinging his legs at the knees, and I could hear the tiny motors whirring.
“When your name popped up on the EC network, all I could think about was splattering your brain all over whatever wall was handy, doing some finger painting with your blood if the mood struck me. Now look at you. I’ll be honest with you, you piece of shit. I am not sure how to proceed.”
Straining and jerking, I wrenched my head around to look directly at Dawson. I tried to say something, and managed to open my mouth, but only managed to force a gurgling sound out, my mouth filling with saliva.
“What’s that?” Dawson said, jumping up and leaning toward me, a hand cupped to his latex ear. “I can access huge translation libraries in seconds, but you don’t seem to be speaking any known human language.” He walked toward me with quick, mincing steps. “But then, as a piece of shit, you’re not human, are you?”
He punctuated this with a sudden backhand blow, so fast it was like a violent nervous tic had seized me.
“So I figure I’ll beat the shit out of you until you loosen up.”
I stared down at the floor as blood dripped from my broken lip and drooled into a puddle below me. My shivering was slowing and subsiding, being replaced joint by joint with a deep, cold ache. I could feel the hard lump of my gun pressing into my back, but I knew that in my present condition I wouldn’t be able to beat Dawson to the draw. Besides, I thought with a weak ripple of tired humor, maybe a good beating would loosen me up.
His hands were on me, then, and everything tilted as the fucking cyborg lifted me up out of the skid and held me up in the air. Sweat and blood and spit dripped down onto Dawson’s white Monk face.
“I am perfect, Mr. Cates. You perfected me. I don’t even need my badge anymore. I walk down the street, you fucking rats scatter. I go hunting at night. Word’s getting around, and all the rats hide underground, now, because they know Barnaby Dawson’s coming.” He cocked his head at me in a familiar birdlike gesture as I hung on his arms like a piece of slaughtered meat. “And I enjoy it, Mr. Cates. But I have a job to do, you know. I am not completely without programming. You’re the last thing on my to-do list, and then it’s a few centuries of enjoying myself.” He looked around, a disturbingly human movement. “Now, what are we doing here, I wonder? Ever since I became Barnaby Dawson Mark Two, Mr. Cates, I have been seeking you out. I have been tracing you with every resource at my discretion. Church feeds, old SSF contacts, good old-fashioned torturing of the rats. I’ve been able to piece together all your movements, and only now does it dawn on me what you’re here to do. You’re going after Squalor, aren’t you?” He laughed, an unnatural sound that didn’t resemble real laughter in any way. “Tell me one thing: Did you really think a rat like you was going to pull this off? That you had the capability?”
I felt his arms tense, and closed my eyes as he heaved me through the air. I slammed into the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth in my mouth, all the air knocked out of me, and I slid to the floor choking, my eyes bugging out of my head.
“I know what you’re wondering,” Dawson went on, walking toward me. “You’re wondering how in the world this fucking brilliant plan of yours went wrong. How come I wasn’t killed by those fucking Monks? The answer is, I’m a prototype. The first step. Bad luck for you. Bad luck,” he stooped, lifting me up again without any apparent effort, “for all the rats.”
He tossed me back onto the floor casually, my head cracking against the concrete, my vision blinking out in a purple flash and then coming back again. Head ringing, I writhed for a second or two and then realized I was, in fact, writhing. I started to crawl away from Barnaby Dawson, my own personal angel of death.
“You’re recovering,” he said behind me, and fuck me if he didn’t sound almost cheerful despite the digital sameness of his voice. “That’s good. I want all your slow wetware synapses online so I can be sure you really feel it when I reach down your fucking rat throat and pull your spine up through your mouth.”
As I crawled, I managed a deep shuddering breath, my ribs cracking with the sudden expansion, and I found, bleeding and crisped at the edges, my voice. “Fuck you,” I grated out, like coughing up razor blades.
Dawson tried to laugh. I got the impression laughter wasn’t programmed into his interface, so what came out was a harsh, strangled sound, a burst of static pushed through the humanizing filters. I ignored it, and kept crawling, feeling parts of me come back to life bit by bit. One thing hadn’t changed about Dawson. He was still a fucking System Pig at heart. It was the only advantage I had, and kept him talking. I raised my eyes from the floor and oriented on the surgery table. I needed to stand up, get my bearings, and for that I was going to need time.
“Fucking Pigs,” I panted. “You were going to kill me.”
There was no immediate response, just a weird fluttering noise, and then Dawson landed directly in front of me, one heavy boot slamming down on my outstretched hand. Not hard enough to break it, somehow. Just hard enough to hurt-the pain seared through my arm and smacked into me, I shuddered helplessly, mouth open, nothing coming out.
“We were going to kill you? Of course we were going to kill you. That’s our fucking job-thinning the herd. If we just let you pieces of shit breed, you’ll become a problem. Are you suggesting I should not do my job?”
The pain, terrible as it was, did not quite compare to the excruciating torment I’d experienced for the past hour or so, lying dead in an electronic coffin. I decided on a different tactic, and slumped, pretending to pass out. There was a chance this would gain me a bullet to the back of the head, but I didn’t think so. Dawson was enjoying himself too much.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said brightly, and the pain suddenly lessened in my hand as I was lifted up and tossed onto the surgery table as if I weighed nothing. The table rattled slightly, but held fast, and I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a little scream as my body hit the solid metal, my arms coming up to shield my face instinctively.
“Better,” Dawson said. “I want to enjoy this, and to do that I need you awake. Don’t pass out again, or I start tearing out your teeth.”
I writhed and moaned, which took very little acting, and snatched a quick glance around the room. Two exits, small, square room. I closed my eyes for a second and pictured the little map of the EC complex. I picked out the room I had to be in, and which door I wanted to get through. I rolled my head back and spotted Dawson, admiring his reflection in the polished metal of one of the doors. No doubt keeping one thought on me, but he was still human inside. Without a mod chip funneling every crazy thought into standard Monk reactions, he was slow and cluttered just like the rest of us.
I took a slow, deep breath, the air slicing my lungs, and clenched my fists hard enough to crack the knuckles. I closed my eyes as I exhaled, and pictured, for a moment, a beach. White sand, almost gray water with white foamy flecks, a blue, crystalline sky. I couldn’t remember when or where I’d seen it-when I’d been a kid? a picture on a Vid? — but it was there, in my head. I recreated it carefully, the quiet sound of waves and wind, the lonely sound of some kind of bird calling in the distance. I concentrated on it, felt my thoughts screw down to a pinpoint, focused on where the gun was. Where Dawson was. If Dawson had hydraulic joints and CPU-aided aim on his side, I had desperation, terror, and pain on mine.
A final glance around the beach, and I moved. One hand went to my gun, tearing it from its hidden holster. The other grabbed the edge of the table as I rolled backward, pulling the table down after me so that it landed on its side and provided instant cover. I landed hard and cracked my head against the concrete again, making me wince and waste a second as a bolt of red blasted through my brain. I came up shooting, but Dawson was in the air, tattered robes fluttering behind him, landing heavy and hard on the table, which collapsed into wreckage under his weight. His hand whipped down and grabbed my gun, cupping the muzzle and forcing me to point it away from him. For one frozen moment we were motionless, Dawson’s reflective sunglasses staring down at me.
“Mr. Cates, you just can’t wait to get killed, can y-”
I pulled the trigger, and Dawson’s hand disappeared in a cloud of latex and metal that pitted my face and stung my eyes. Dawson didn’t react. He just stared down at me for one panted breath, two, three, and then we moved simultaneously: I tried to swing the gun up to blow his fucking head off, and Dawson swung his stump up to block me while still holding on to me with his good hand. His arm glanced off mine, I pulled the trigger, and Dawson was knocked backward over the table by the force of the shot, a ragged hole torn in his neck. He began to twitch violently, shouting in a strangely warped version of the standard Monk’s voice.
“Oh, you fucking motherfucker! You fucking motherfucker!”
I just lay there hurting and watched Dawson, unsure how to take this. I figured I had nicked some vital data bus or wire bank or something. I pulled myself up with effort, and Dawson just kept twitching and screaming. I kept the gun on him and leaned against the table, breathing hard. I knew the Monks had a lot of hidden weaponry,
and I wasn’t taking any chances. When the far door snicked open, I looked up tiredly, but didn’t have a chance in hell of fighting any more battles. Our version of Canny Orel appeared, guns in hand and moving fast. Seeing me, he paused, glanced at the twitching Monk, and then back at me.
“You’re making a goddamn racket in here, Cates,” he said.
I bent to pick up one of the nasty-looking cutting tools that had spilled onto the floor and brandished it at him weakly. Behind him, Gatz, Kieth, Milton, and Tanner pushed into the doorway.
“Your cover’s blown, Cates,” Kieth said breathlessly. “The whole place knows you’re here and how you got in. Lucky for you there are dozens of these arrival kiosks, and Ty’s set off alarms in every one of them to cover you for a bit. Might buy us ten minutes.”
“Come on,” I panted. “Help me hold this down. We’ve got work to do.”
XXX
AND WHEN I DIE, I’LL BEQUEATH YOU TO SOMEONE
10110
“Ty hates to tell you this,” Kieth said breathlessly as they all pushed into the room, “but the entire complex knows shots were fired inside.” He glanced down at a small device with a glowing blue screen. “Ty’s been monitoring the EC’s bandwidth, and Christ, it just exploded.”
I nodded weakly. “Come here and help me cut off this fucker’s arms and legs.”
Orel remained standing in the doorway, looking around lazily. They were dressed in remarkably good suits, hair slicked back, each of them bearing a smart-looking black bag, the standard kind of telecom bag the Vids used. I’d seen teams just like them at all the press conferences and riot scenes, and Orel, though old for the job, did have the polished, well-fed look of a Vid reporter. Gatz walked over to Dawson, who still twitched and sputtered. Milton and Tanner walked directly over to me, though, and took one arm each.
