The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  I ignored him, keeping my eyes on the move, looking for any clue.

  He might circle back behind you, Marin whispered in my head.

  I shook my head and caught myself. I didn’t respond. Orel hadn’t come here to sneak around and do some old-school Gunning, wearing us down until we fucked up and he got one single, perfect shot. He’d come to make me feel the wrath of the new god. There would be fucking taunts, and he’d play with us, make us understand that he would have let us go, he would have let us live out our measly little lives in peace, but we had to go fuck with him.

  A single shot, small and wet like a firecracker, plinked in the distance, immediately swallowed by the silence.

  “Rafeal is dead,” a man’s voice, calm and monotone, whispered in my ear. I didn’t know who the fuck Rafeal was, or had been, and I wasn’t interested.

  “Grisha, you getting any more buzz?”

  “Nothing, Avery,” the Russian replied in a hushed voice. “No other motion detectors have been triggered.”

  He’s fucking with us, I thought. He’s going to have us jumping at shadows.

  He’s got you jumping at shadows, Salgado hissed. What a waste. So much yen poured into this place, so much tech and blood and sweat. And they used it for a brain-suck operation, and we bombed it to hell. And now an arena for you and Orel. A waste.

  Dolores, I thought, keeping my eyes open and moving, I regret to inform you the one positive I can take away from having Canny Orel’s gun shoved up my ass is that I will never have to hear your thoughts again.

  “Hello, Avery.”

  Marko’s voice in my ear. I went still, putting my eyes on the ammo locker marking the location of the cage and tried to be aware of my surroundings, all around me, picturing the layout of the prison, the approaches to my position. “Hello, Mickey,” I said quietly.

  “Interestin’ band of morons you’ve assembled here, Avery,” he continued in my ear, in Marko’s voice but with Orel’s patterns.

  “C’mon, old man,” I whispered. “Come try me. Quit hiding.”

  “Avery?” Marko’s voice again, but once again wit the original-issue accent.

  “Move, Mr. Marko,” I hissed. “Displace. Keep your assignment in line of sight but move. You’re spotted.”

  “Yer problem,” Grisha suddenly spoke in my ear, loud and with Orel’s accent, “is you think you’re special.”

  I threw myself into a roll, thinking, The fucking bastard can see us all. I spun myself out and around the wall, flopping onto my belly and crawling rapidly through the sandy dirt until I was on the other side.

  “Marko,” I whispered as I hauled myself along the wall, breathing in more sand than air. “You find yourself a new spot?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Fuck me, that was fucking horrible. I’m—”

  “Do not fucking tell me where you are,” I hissed. My lungs were burning and my mouth was full of grit. Sweat was streaming down my face as I crawled despite the cold. “You still have a line of sight?”

  “A line of—oh. Yeah, I got it.”

  “Shit, I’m not even going to kill these poor bastards,” Orel barked in Grisha’s familiar voice, flat and lifeless without the accent. “I’m goin’ to spare their miserable brief little lives and let ’em crawl around a little more. I’m gonna show up at their fuckin’ funerals and give the fuckin’ eulogy. Here lies some asshole. Avery Cates tried his best to get ’im killed, just like every-fucking-body Cates ever met.”

  I found the far edge of the ruined dorm wall and peered around it. I could see the depression that was the bombed-out basement of the old complex, the sandy soil coasting downward toward the elevator shaft. I figured Orel was out in the darkness behind us, and I needed to feint out, grab his eye, and get him coming to me before he managed to put me in the air or Push me.

  Seconds ticked by. I listened to the wind and stared into the dark.

  “Grish?” I whispered.

  There was a soft cough, and then a deep breath. “A-Avery?”

  He sounded normal again. “You okay, man?”

  He didn’t respond for a moment. “I am… okay, Avery. It was like… like someone worming into me. I could feel it happening, being… pushed aside.”

  “Displace, Grish,” I whispered back. “Don’t sit there. He knows you’re there.”

  “Yes to that.”

  I forced myself to pick a spot on the horizon and study it, clearing my mind and just letting instinct and the primitive wiring of my head lead me. He was a god, maybe, but he was still a tired old man, deep down, and tired old men—even the great Canny Orel—made mistakes. Fuck, I was living proof of that.

  “Hello, Avery.”

  I froze. The voice was right behind me.

  XXXVII

  RISING TRIUMPHANTLY FROM THE TRASH BIN OF HISTORY

  It didn’t sound like Orel, his raw, wide brogue and the nasally, creaking way he had of enunciating. It was the flat pitch of the old Monks, devoid of anything like curiosity or detail, something a computer had decided approximated a human voice. The words were sucked dry and vanished by the cold wind, and a second later it was like he hadn’t spoken at all. If I stayed still and kept my eyes straight ahead, I might pretend it had never happened.

  My HUD flickered and went dim.

  “You stupid bastard,” he said. I judged him to be about five feet behind me, a little elevated. I raked my eyes over the scene in front of me; I didn’t want to turn and provoke him. If he wanted to stand there and do his little demigod routine, let him waste the time. The ground sloped down into the basement, the elevator shaft a dark blob of nothing at the far end. I didn’t see Marko or Grisha, or anything else that might be useful. I fixed the location of the cage in my mind, ahead and to the left. Get him there and hope Marko was awake and paying attention.

  I wouldn’t beat his digital reflexes. I wouldn’t get the drop on him. But trying to was the only play I had. I sucked a slow, deep breath in, gripped my automatic loosely, finger on the trigger, made sure the safety was off, and whipped myself around.

  Instantly, the Monk soared into the air with a strangled squawk. I’d barely caught a glimpse of it, so familiar—a shiny new model, the face bright white in the moonlight, the eyes just dark circles where I knew tiny, delicate cameras clicked and ticked for eyes. He was wearing a heavy longcoat that spread out behind him in the wind as he sailed upward, his white hands and face soon all I could see.

  I just sat there and stared up for a second. I thought at first he’d put himself up there for an attack, but as he twisted and rolled in the air I realized one of the other Tele-Ks had put their hand on him.

  For a second I just stared, blood filling my head like pus into a wound and muffling everything. He looked so tiny and peaceful, like a satellite a thousand miles above us, so far away he couldn’t possibly hurt anything. He twisted and spun in the air, struggling against the invisible fist he’d been caught in, and I found the sight mesmerizing.

  There were shouts in the distance drifting through the dry, chilled air. I spun around, catching sight of figures in the near distance running toward me—Grisha’s people, rifles in hands. They swarmed past me without even a second glance, took up positions ringing the general area, set themselves on their knees, and took aim up at his tiny little figure… and then did nothing. They sat there with rifles fixed and just stared up at him, afraid to accidentally kill him if they started to fire at him.

  “Fucking hell,” I muttered, slamming my Roon back into its holster and pushing myself into a staggering jog at them. The closest one was a grizzled old woman of fort, her face a permanent red mask of weather and booze. As I stepped up to her I took hold of the smooth barrel of her rifle and gave her a playful shove that sent her tumbling to the sandy ground, the gun tearing from her hands. I took a second to look the ancient stick over and checked the chamber, wrapped the shoulder strap around my forearm to get it out of the way, and lifted it up. Through the scope Orel looked ridiculous, a tiny
Monk fluttering in the air like he was a kite, a piece of plastic. I guessed our Tele-K was trying to put him on the ground where our cage was buried and Orel was pushing himself in the other direction. Taking a deep breath, I decided to change the rules of the game, and I squeezed the trigger as I exhaled.

  Behind me, as if I’d set off some sort of alarm, there was a rumbling noise, vibrations shooting up through my legs.

  I ignored it. Racking the action again, I glanced down at the blond woman to make sure she wasn’t creeping back to get her revenge on me, then concentrated on the fluttering figure in the air and squeezed off another round. I started to turn my attention back to the blonde, but a sudden earthquake beneath me and an ear-splitting, groaning noise tearing through the thin air made me spin around. I stared for a second; the old half-buried SSF hover was tilting and vibrating, shifting this way and that in the crater that held it upright. I turned to glance up at Orel, who was twisting and fluttering, one black arm stretched out toward the ground.

  I snapped my head back around just in time to see the hover slowly disgorge itself from the earth, the ground shaking hard under me. Sixty feet of alloy and plastic, intact displacers along its belly each weighing a ton, a ton and a half. Years of sandy soil caked around it after an impact that had buried it twenty feet into the crust. And it jerked and tugged upward in loud, shaky spasms, the metal groaning as it bent and tore under the stress.

  Suddenly it popped free, snapping up into the air. Everything seemed to go still. The hover stopped and hung impossibly in the air for a second, huge and heavy and weightless. If not for the complete, dense silence you could have believed the hover had spontaneously shaken off years of rust and decay and ignited its displacers, rising triumphantly from the trash bin of history. I turned in time to see the tiny figure in the sky twitch.

  With a tearing noise of rending metal, the hover flicked into motion, accelerating suddenly toward the guard tower. The tearing noise deepened as it picked up speed, making the hairs on my neck and arms stand up, and when it smacked into the tower it was a relief to have it ended. The hover broke up into four or five large pieces, each crashing down to the earth again, and the tower began collapsing in slow motion: A loud cracking sound like a gunshot and the tower was leaning crazily to one side, falling so slowly it might have been my imagination. Outlined against the silvery night sky I saw one figure jump, arms and legs moving wildly as he plummeted. When it was almost perpendicular to the ground, the tower shattered into dust, and then the ground leaped beneath my feet, a huge cloud of debris and sand billowing up from the ground.

  Orel fell, swallowed up by the shadowy dust storm.

  For a few heartbeats we all just stood there like assholes as silence swallowed everything again and settled in. So much for our volunteer Spooks, I thought.

  Movement at my elbow made me jump. The blonde I’d snatched the rifle from was standing next to me. She glanced my way and we shrugged our eyebrows at each other. I opened my mouth to say something smart, then snapped it shut as a loud scraping sound made the ground shudder again. Leaning forward slightly, I squinted through the darkness, then looked around. I was in the midst of Grisha’s morons, which suddenly looked exactly like a bull’s-eye. If I were Orel, a group of dumbfounded Techies standing with their mouths open and their rifles at their sides would look like fucking lunch.

  I turned and started running hard, heading sideways to escape their gravity well of stupid.

  When the scraping noise suddenly ceased, I twisted my head around without stopping, just in time to see a chunk of the toppled guard tower shoot up out of the settling dust, soaring twenty or thirty feet into the air on a lazy arc. I stumbled and sat down on my ass, the rifle I was still holding on to for reasons my hands refused to explain skittering away from me like a piece of kindling. The hunk of rock was twenty or thirty feet around, jagged on the edges but smooth on the sides, and for a second it was suspended in the air like a newly acquired moon.

  The Techies didn’t move. They just stood there, staring.

  It’s hard to adjust, Marin whispered in my head, unwelcome. The first time you really have to deal with a first-class Psionic. They break all the rules, and it takes some time to adjust.

  The hunk of building screamed down at them, three seconds, two heartbeats. The split second before it hit, my little earbud crackled to life for a blink.

  “Holy—”

  And went dead. The impact was so massive I was tossed into the air a few inches, falling back down onto my ass again as a little extra bonus on the evening. A wave of sandy soil hit me with force, carpeting me in a thick layer, getting into my mouth and nose and making me cough and heave.

  Gasping, I flipped myself over and got moving. My head was swimming, so I crawled. I needed to move, to build up some momentum.

  “Avery?” Grisha’s voice in my ear. “Avery? Where are you?”

  Translation: Are you under that fucking building right now? I didn’t even try to respond. I pushed myself up onto my feet and managed a stumbling, crazy-legged jog, trying to simultaneously clear my windpipe and suck in air. I made for the low remnant of the old dorm wall, poor cover but cover nonetheless, with the yawning elevator shaft behind it as a final retreat. I reached it, my head pounding, the faint outlines of my dimmed HUD pulsing like they’d been burned onto my retinas, until with one final pulse the HUD snapped back into bright clarity. I skidded around to the other side, intending to drop down and try to spot Orel from my hiding place.

  Then I heard it: steady, heavy footsteps, right behind me. Too heavy for anything but an avatar… or a Monk. I kept running and yanked my Roon from its holster again, trying to clear my mind.

  When he came, he came too fast, fucking fast, zooming up from the shadows, coming at an angle. I squeezed the trigger but the shots trailed him as he traced a wide loop around me, coming at me from the side, flipping me onto my back and pinning me. Orel weighed about eleven fucking million pounds and I sank slowly into the loose dirt beneath him.

  His face was the standard grinning Monk face, limited in expression, always, somehow, cheerful and blank at the same time. He’d lost his shades, and his tiny insectoid camera eyes dilated as they focused on me, his smile static and automatic, forgotten, unintended.

  His artificial voice was like melted rubber.

  “Ever been Taken, Avery?” he said, calm and unhurried. “Traveled into?”

  XXXVIII

  EATING MY BRAIN ONE TINY BITE AT A TIME, TUNNELING

  I froze for a moment, hearing Grisha’s words: Like someone worming into me. I remembered every time I’d been Pushed, and wondered which was worse: being made to do things you didn’t want, or having someone just push you aside and do them with your body while you sat inside your own head, screaming.

  I struggled to bring an arm up, but the Monk chassis was too strong. He went still and I struggled harder, heaving against him, his alloy bones and hydraulic tendons, my legs flopping uselessly like they were part of some other asshole entirely, delighted with the show so far. I heard shouting, then the weak, distant pop pop of gunfire, too distant to do me any good.

  And then I felt it.

  It was like pressure in my thoughts, a sudden and urgent new focus, like someone had whispered something to me that I had no choice but to think about immediately. The pressure grew and grew and I stopped flopping about, my whole body going stiff with strain as I tried to break free and think about something else, anything, anything that was not this huge balloon of nothing, this black hole growing in my head.

  And then, without warning, the mental bubble just shattered, and I was in control again, my legs picking up their useless flopping without missing a beat.

  Orel screamed, a metallic warbly screech that hurt my ears, and he sailed up off me as if some huge being had reached down from the sky and plucked him up. I sat up, panting, and watched him stagger backward into the old basement, beating at his own head with his hands.

  “Ah, fuck you an
d your mutant fucking brain,” he bellowed.

  I scrambled along the low wall until I found a shallow indentation in the loose ground that provided a little shelter. I fumbled with the Roon, trying to check it over with shaking hands, my head pounding. I felt like I’d been chewed. I risked a quick pop up to make sure Orel wasn’t moving. He was still standing there, cursing and shaking his head.

  Your fucked-up brain gave him the fits, Marin whispered, sounding amused.

  That is an unauthorized jailbroken Mark I chassis. It should be deactivated immediately.

  I blinked, shaking my head. I didn’t hear from Dennis Squalor often, and I didn’t enjoy it when I did. Good luck with that, I thought back at him. Usually when I communicated with him he fled like a frightened bug.

  This is unacceptable. This unit is operating outside my network.

  I stole another glance at Orel and snapped the Roon shut. Shut up, I thought. I’m fucking working here.

  Squalor ignored me. If he could even hear me.

  We must apply the shutdown code set.

  Anger flared up in me as I tried to ignore the suddenly chatty voices in my head and listen for Orel’s approach. He couldn’t see me where I was hunkered down, so he couldn’t put me in the air. If I timed it right, I might put a shell or two in him when he came for me.

  We don’t have the shutdown codes, shithead, I thought. Orel’s got them.

  Not the antimutiny codes Richard created for his own network, Squalor said slowly, calmly. My codes. I cannot tolerate someone operating one of my units outside the faith. It must be deactivated.

  Suddenly, Marin was there too. Marin was still talking. Will it still work?

  I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth. Years now I’d had these ghosts in my head, and now they decided to start chatting. I was fucking cursed.

  Yes. These codes are part of the Bootstrap subsystems. It is unlikely in the extreme that any hacker trying to subvert a unit would be capable of even discovering their existence.