by Jeff Somers
“No,” Grisha said. “Avery, if we release him from the device, he will immediately be able to compel us with his ability. Come, let us talk in the other room.”
“Fuck you,” I repeated. “Let him out.” I closed my eyes. “If he can stop me from squeezing the fucking life out of him with my bare hands, he deserves to live.”
I heard the skinny Russian bastard crouch down next to me. When he spoke, it was right into my ear. His breath smelled like cigarettes and rot. “Avery, I am sorry you have lost your friend in this way. This… Pusher wished to have access to you on a continuous basis in order to have time to dig into your psyche gently, without being noticed. For his own reasons he decided that assuming the identity of your friend was the easiest way to do so. This obviously worked. It would have continued to work if not for our intervention.” He put his hand on my shoulder and I twitched, controlling myself with effort. “There is a war going on, Avery, and you are a battlefield. Come, let us talk.”
“No,” I said, opening my eyes and finding the fucking codger still staring at me, his mouth working like he was chewing cud. I realized I could hear his labored breathing. “I don’t care about anything aside from strangling this piece of shit. Take your war outside, Grisha.”
He sighed, and the patience in his exhalation made me want to smack him. From what I remembered about Grisha, the blow might not land. “Avery, for all his power, this piece of shit is just a soldier. The Angels. You know of them.”
I nodded once. “Yes.”
“You can kill him. They will send another. They will be less subtle. Less gentle. Eventually they will pop your mind open like a legume and scoop you out, sift through the scattered thoughts.” He leaned in again, close to my ear. “This is not the man to kill. This is simply a tool used against you.”
Suddenly I was very tired and just wanted to be left alone to gnaw over that day. I should have known something was wonky, that something was off. I’d been knocked over the head and when I’d come to, a dead body, Belling dead, and Remy not quite right. He hadn’t been right, and I hadn’t noticed, or I’d been forced not to notice. Either way, he was dead, and I kept hearing him in Hong Kong: You left me. You fucking left me. I might as well have killed him myself back in Englewood, before we got pressed, for all the good I’d done him.
I let Grisha urge me to my feet and lead me out of the room. I turned in the doorway and looked back to find the short little bastard still staring at me.
The next room was the same size: long and narrow, claustrophobic. The walls weren’t as covered by endless banks of electronic equipment, and were a rusty-colored corrugated metal; I realized we were in a series of old shipping containers that had been welded together into a structure. It was hot, and Grisha’s fellow SPS members looked sweaty and sad in their grubby jumpsuits, sitting around an eroded wooden table that left barely enough room for people to squeeze past.
The skinny Indian immediately offered me a metal cup filled with something that I assumed was supposed to be coffee, and for a second I forgot everything else and missed the System, the good old System of Federated Nations, with a passion. It had been fucked up and dangerous and I’d done my part to tear it down, but fuck, you could get a decent cup of coffee and a real cigarette back then.
As if reading my mind, the Indian followed the coffee with a burning cigarette. I took it with numb fingers, then watched Grisha as he moved toward a white porcelain urn sitting on a simple battery-powered burner.
“So, why?” I asked thickly. All my instant anger had melted away, and I just felt tired and beaten. I’d been swimming against currents for years, and the cosmos kept ducking my head under the waves.
Grisha poured himself some coffee and then turned, gesturing to an empty chair. I ignored him and sniffed at the coffee. I needed to know who I had to blame for Remy, who I had to go kill, and I could tell Grisha wasn’t going to tell me unless I let him ramble out his whole story. And Grish was one of those oddball Techies you couldn’t twist it out of. Not easily, anyway.
He sighed and leaned against the wall next to the coffee urn. I was aware of four faces on me, studying me, and I resisted the urge to look at the Indian to see if he had that black rod in his hand, if he was going to make sure I didn’t misbehave.
“Our purpose, Avery, is not simply to build such fine quarters for ourselves and create toys,” he began, sipping coffee and making a face. “We are a voluntary organization, and we are trying to preserve technology. These are new dark ages, yes? Civil war, the erosion of authority, the breakup of the System, Marin’s destruction—you have seen the state of the world. Chaos. Fragmented culture. The complete collapse of the manufacturing base, which had been too heavily centralized and fragile under the undersecretaries. All it took was destabilization of one aspect of the chain and everything comes down, yes?”
I nodded vaguely. “It’s a fucking shit stom out there, sure.”
Grisha smiled. “Yes, apt: shit storm.” He shrugged. “We are here to save what can be saved, in hope that when the world stabilizes again we will not have to rediscover everything, yes? But it is not just technology we find ourselves protecting, seeking.” He paused and looked around at his fellow Techies. “Avery, do you know when the last live human birth was?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“The last time someone had a baby,” he added through a spasm of damp-sounding coughs. “That lived.”
I frowned over my mug, which smelled like something you’d describe as coffee if you’d never smelled coffee before in your life. “You mean aside from me?”
It was an automatic joke. I didn’t know why I’d said it, or where it had come from.
Grisha smiled. “Six years ago. This is the last confirmed live birth in the world, Avery. It is possible, of course,” he continued with a wave, “that due to the breakdown of communication lines and scientific work that we have merely missed every report and simply not observed the teeming thousands of newborns mewling everywhere. But it is more likely that for some reason, as yet unexplained, the human race has simply gone sterile.”
I thought back over the last few years. A lot of my attention had been taken up with not being shot in the face, but I could not recall any young children. No one under six, that was certain—plenty of dirty-faced preteens itching to steal your wallet or swarm you in an alley. Yeah, plenty of dirty-faced moppets like Adora’s sister, learning to drink at nine and looking fifty by the time they were thirteen, sure. But no babies.
Then I remembered Remy, and stopped caring. There was a boulder jammed in my chest, blocking every thought and making my head throb with ebbing blood.
“Dying. We are dying, as a race, Avery. As an organization, SPS is split in its preferred response to this crisis. Some feel we should be putting our dwindling resources into trying to solve the problem. I and others believe that time has past, and we are seeking to salvage what we can.”
I let my eyes crawl around the interior of the container, feeling tight and buried, cooking alive inside this metal box, with Grisha’s calm, jolly voice droning on and on. I needed one fucking piece of information from him: Where to go, who to hunt, who was responsible for Remy. I wanted to launch myself across their stupid fucking salvage table and toss my hot coffee in his eyes and push the cigarette into his forehead until he squealed, then ask him politely what I needed to know. Except Grisha wouldn’t squeal, and his three friends would pull me off him, and then I’d find myself tied down to a gurney again.
So I listened.
“We are sadly reduced. We cannot fabricate things. We are forced to work with whatever we find—components that can be cannibalized, re-used, re-programmed. We are good at this. But we have no more capability of genetic research, of even primitive reproductive science beyond forced breeding—which was, I am ashamed to say, seriously considered. But we are facing textinction of the human race. Any possible escape route must be considered.”
Aside from the table and the coffee, t
he room was filled with crates with obscure labels. Some of them had been torn open, a yellow fuzz of packing material spilling out like guts, looking scratchy and hot. On the other side of the table was another door, tightly shut and barred on the inside, and off to the side in the dark corner was a tall, narrow crate, on which sat my Roon and three spare clips.
“Happily—though we are not unanimous on the happiness of this thought, I confess—this world is littered with technology we might use to preserve the intellect and culture of the remaining humans, such as it is. Happily, we do already have a great number of high-quality intelligences filed.”
Reminding myself not to stare at things you wanted, I dragged my eyes back to Grisha. It was remarkable how unchanged he was. Face still narrow, eyes cheerful, stupid fucking glasses. “Filed?” I asked, feeling dumb and slow.
“Avatars, Avery. The human race is slipping into the dark night, yes? One day the last of us dies, what is left? We can digitize intelligences, but someone must be out and about, for maintenance. We had designed our world for arms and legs; we must have them. Avatars, Avery. The whole world is littered with avatar shells, most damaged, but many usable with some repair. The civil war left us with a supply, you see. We have been collecting them, preparing the way. Most are simply irradiated, which will not matter once the rest of us are all dead!” He shrugged, planting the cigarette back in his mouth and toasting me with his coffee. “As we die, we process people, and at least there is a remnant of us to carry on.” He shrugged his eyebrows. “Also, we can choose who to salvage and who not. Leave the bastards responsible for the mess behind.”
I glanced at the gun again and took an easy step to my left, making as if to claim the empty seat next to the Indian Techie. “The human race is dying, and you want to stuff us all into avatars?”
“What choice? Every day, thousands of us perish—natural causes, people like you, bad fish—leaving us reduced. Time is running out quickly. When the patient is bleeding, you apply tourniquet.”
I nodded as if I gave a shit and was processing everything carefully. “And this has what to do with me, exactly?” I said carefully, trying to guide him where I wanted him.
He sighed, standing up. With an easy motion, he set his coffee down on the table, stepped over to the smaller table, and picked up the Roon and clips, turning and holding them out to me.
“Before you hurt someone,” he said, cigarette waggling up and down. “For fuck’s sake, Avery, you are not a prisoner. I have full confidence you will choose to help us.
“There is one problem with using the avatar stock: All are tied to Director Marin’s old network.” I groaned inwardly. Richard Fucking Marin. Everything had gone to hell the first day I’d met that artificial bastard, and here he was still haunting me.
I’m hurt, Avery, his ghost or imprint or whatever whispered in my head, like he’d been doing for ye. Your friendship has meant the world to me. Am I really destroyed in real life?
“Marin now exists only as a scatter of atoms floating through the atmosphere.” He sighed. “The avatar models are all System Police, and all are tied to an annual signal from Marin’s private key. This to prevent mutinies, you see—if Marin cannot send signal, the whole avatar network shuts down. Marin was destroyed right at the end—near a year ago.” He shrugged again. “This means all the avatar stock we have collected—as well as every System Pig still walking around in Europe, trying to hold the sand castle together—will shut down and be totally inoperative in about three months.” He picked up his coffee and spread his arms. “So you see: problem.”
I nodded, checking over the Roon. “Your confidence in me makes me want to be a better person, Grish,” I said. “But I’m still waiting to hear why my friend was killed and why a fucking Angel has been pushing his fat fingers into my head for three fucking weeks.” I racked the chamber and clicked off the safety. “And then maybe you could explain why I shouldn’t go back in the other room and make that piece of shit’s head explode.”
Grisha nodded as if this were a reasonable request he’d been expecting. From what I remembered about Grisha, maybe it was; he was a Techie, smart and skilled, and he was someone who could blow your head off and not flinch. He was probably the most dangerous bastard, one on one, in the whole damn world.
As I moved back toward the front of the room, he moved with me on the other side of the table. None of the other Techies moved, but they didn’t get out of my way, either.
“Marin was, you know this, a digital construct. A scan of the once-flesh Cal Ruberto, made into a god. He had programmed limits on his behaviors—this you know also, as your first interaction with him was designed to create a scenario that allowed him to elevate his security status and disable some of those restraints. The Joint Council knew enough to fear Marin when they created him, Avery, so they not only set up these limits, they programmed him to have override codes. In case he slipped his chains.” He waved the coffee around. “If there had been a functioning Joint Council when Marin pulled his stunt with you, this code would certainly have been used. It was not, obviously, and until recently the code itself was thought to be lost. It was not lost.”
Without warning, he took three quick steps and put himself in front of the door leading to the second container and put one hand up in a placating gesture. In honor of the friendship we had, I kept the Roon aimed at the floor and stopped for a moment, clenching my teeth.
“Avery, it is firmly established that you know where this code can be retrieved. With Marin’s override, we can disable his safeties on the avatar network and utilize the avatar stock safely.”
I opened my mouth, thought better of it, and then frowned, all thoughts of what I’d been doing gone. “That’s fucking insane, Grisha. I don’t know where Dick Marin’s fucking override codes are.”
You don’t, Dolores Salgado whispered in my head, and I froze, my heart pounding. But I do.
XIII
THAT IS… UNFORTUNATE
I imagined Salgado walled up in a cell, behind inches and inches of old brick, her voice barely audible, muffled. Then I looked at Grisha.
“Step aside,” I said slowly, keeping every muscle under conscious control to stop myself from leaping for his throat. “I am going to kill that fucking thing in there.” The Pusher had killed Remy. I couldn’t change that, but I could make him wish he hadn’t.
Grisha smiled sadly and shook his head. “Avery, I do not imagine I can trade body blows with you. I have seen you work. But you cannot be permitted to kill that man until we have debriefed him. Until we have debriefed you.”
I heard the scrape of a chair behind me, and ticked my head slightly. “Tell your friend with the cattle prod he’s not going to touch me.”
Grisha didn’t say anything, but his eyes moved over my head and he shook his head just slightly. He looked back at me and shrugged. “I am not moving, Avery. You will have to attack me.”
I swallowed with difficulty; it felt like I had someone alive in my throat, clawing its way up. I couldn’t bring anyone back to life. I couldn’t go back ten years and do everything differently, but I could kill the fat old bastard in a cage in the next room. I could kill him so hard it left a fucking mark, and it was all I wanted to do. The Angels. I didn’t need Grisha to draw me a fucking picture. I was sure the Russian had info I could use—he always did—but I didn’t need it that badly. I’d find them.
“Grish—”
With a sudden jerk of his arm, he dashed his lukewarm coffee into my face.
“Avery, listen. We are not talking about your wounds, your losses. Hell, we have all lost. Do you imagine you are the only person who has survived a global war? The only person who has fought and killed?”
I stood there in numb shock, coffee dripping off my face. Grisha had never done anything like that, and I didn’t know how to react. He shook his head. “You cannot be this arrogant.” He tossed his empty cup to the floor with a savage disdain that made me hesitate. “This is not about you. The w
hole world is dying, Avery. The whole fucking world. You will not be allowed to derail this process for petty revenge.”
I wanted him to move, to let me past, but I found I could not lift my gun against Grisha. We had been through a lot, and he had been a true friend, back in Chengara and afterward, even if he had tried to kill me once. For a second or two we both just stood there, and I could hear the harsh rasp of my breath in and out of my nose.
I looked down at my hands. “Fuck, Grisha,” I said slowly, begging. “I don’t fucking know anything.”
I heard Salgado—a whisper in my head, silent and clear, years ago, back when I was being tortured inChengara Penitentiary for information I didn’t know then, either: I know that Marin did not suspend all of his programmed overrides. I know that there are bare-metal panic codes built into his design. I do not know the overrides myself. But I know the identity of the one person who does.
The person who does, I thought.
I looked back up at him, and for a moment we just looked at each other, and I felt my shoulders roll. I couldn’t fuck with Grisha. He’d never done me wrong, and I could not ignore that.
“Salgado,” I said.
He nodded. “Salgado.” He reached up and put a hand on my shoulder. “I am sorry, Avery. We must intrude upon you again.”
“Dolores Salgado,” the Indian Techie, named Lokprakash—who everyone wisely called Lok—read from a thick hard copy. I hadn’t seen so much paper in years. “Original undersecretary, originally serving under Councilman Cavendish. Prior to Unification, she was retired.” His accent was English, bitten off with cheerful relish, as if words were fun. “She served as undersecretary for the Australian Department and generally got good grades, right up until Marin arrested her under authority of the Emergency Stabilization Directive, colloquially known as the Monk Act, as it was issued during the Monk Riots that followed the collapse of the Electric Church.” He looked up at me and winked. I resolved to break his nose at the earliest opportunity.
