Escapology

by Ren Warom

  He reels on, clutching his skull. Just gotta keep going until he’s home free from this shit but as the crowd surges around him, ka-thump becomes full-on jungle trip-hop track and the missiles, thus far arcing silent and splendid across the cranial horizon, slam into his lobes. The resulting explosion is like a sun going nova in his brain, sound hitting long after light, deafening, then the shock waves, cranial earthquakes, blast reason to oblivion.

  It’s painless but leaves no room for anything but itself, and Shock pushes on blindly, shoving folk aside, stumbling like a drunkard. Screaming at nothing and nobody. Blood wells, thick and choking, in his nose, drips for a second in globes large as cherry-bombs, then all-out gushes, and he’s a walking gore-factory, neoprene jacket streaked with thick, clotted rivulets. They hit the pavement: mini paint-balls dyeing the rain red as gochujang sauce, and not one soul’s clocked his condition, walking on oblivious or uncaring. Probably have him down as some loser trip-whore or liver-hound on a one-way journey to flatlines and ash. Oh the irony.

  Cranial aftershocks become pain again at last; deep, grinding pain, and somewhere in there, a siren begins to go off, although the blitz has already been and gone, leaving his brainscape flattened and burning. This sound, rippling as it does through raddled nerves on some low, undeniable frequency, unseats whatever control he has over his stomach and he throws up the siu bao he choked down for breakfast in one heave, blood from his nose dripping into the brownish slew like undigested ketchup.

  The siren simultaneously builds and quietens until it’s less sound than pressure pounding against the inside of his skull and Shock’s sure this is the big goodbye. Breadbox implosion. Skull-scattering fireworks. Instead, as pressure reaches max, golden lights burst from his eyes.

  The whine snaps off. Snaps everything. His connection to Slip severs clean as flesh under a blade. He feels it go, just like those moments as a child when you walk into a room at night and the lights snap off, leaving you lost in darkness with only the sound of your breath coming faster and faster as fear crawls upward from your toes on spindly legs. Marooned in silence, Shock finally stops moving. He’s forgotten how. Every atom is focused on what was lost, what’s been broken.

  Held in a vacuum, he’s captured, hypnotized, by the light beams shining from his eyes, their reflection in the rain-soaked sidewalk. Obviously he’s honest to goodness tripping out, or maybe dead. Dead would be good. Shock stares at his face in the muddled mirror of a puddle, astounded. He looks like a degenerate God. Around him, there’s a ripple of reaction at last. A murmured crescendo. Sounds like voices. Who’s talking to him? He can’t answer, his eyes are headlights, and he’s frozen inside them.

  Threads of brighter gold, like nano-necklaces, trickle down the gold beams, begin to weave together and, from golden threads, before his bomb-blasted, God-bright, dissipated peepers, two shapes begin to form. Avis. His avis. Shark, cruising in circles around his head, coalescing closer to 3D with each circuit. And Puss, ghostly tentacles swirling on the sidewalk as it turns toward his leg and slides up. He can feel it there, against the material of his trousers. Solid. But the material doesn’t move.

  Dead. He has to be dead. Except he feels them, both of them, right there in his mind. Distinct and present as his own consciousness. Not an illusion as he thought, but real. Real. Sound fades in, the world on its heels, and Shock finds he’s not dead. Not dreaming. He’s stood in the middle of the street, Puss clinging to his chest, Shark swimming hungry circles between himself and a crowd of people who look as stunned as he feels. Mouths agape, pupils blown wide.

  Shock watches the shark, the crowd, not knowing what to think, to say. They’re real. They’re real. And they’re with him, within him, listening in to his every thought.

  Then a woman on the edge of the crowd snaps.

  Terror ignites in her eyes, blazes across her face. She begins screaming, her bag dropping from her hand, sumptuous grey leather soaking up gore-spattered rain. The impasse breaks with her, people exploding away like flocks of hysterical gulls colliding and screeching, bags flying like feathers. In the mayhem, feeling Shock’s spike of panic, Shark powers forward, creating a pathway. Quick on the up-take thanks to their connection—intimate in ways he’s still struggling to adjust to—Shock races away from the scene, unable to feel his feet.

  He runs until his legs give out, and he staggers to a wall, gasping for breath. With every attempt for air a tight knot of tears rises in his throat. Slip is gone, its absence absolute as a slammed door. His avis, real and locked out with him, are vulnerable. Helpless. They need him to be together, but he’s not, he can’t. Everything’s wrong, and Emblem’s still stuck in his drive, no longer painful but so fucking big and growing now, filling it bit by bit. What will happen when it reaches the edges?

  Focused on the Heights before, he’s all but forgotten that objective. It flits into his mind now, so tempting, but the thing inside of him that’s no longer him but them, Puss and Shark made real, alive, and separate, shies away from heading toward anywhere the Queens might find them with such vehemence he’s running in the opposite direction almost before he realizes it.

  Shock’s hands tangle in his hair, scraping at his skull. In the distance he hears screaming, sec-drone sirens. The wail of security vans. They parallel his internal alarms. Twist is coming. Every fucking crime lord in the Gung will follow. He has to scramble. Find a bolthole, somewhere safe. He has no idea where to go. Tears finally find their way through, coiling hot paths down his cheeks, capturing locks of his hair, dripping onto his chest, through Puss, who clings there like a child.

  “What the fuck do I do? Just what the fuck do I do?”

  Time to Call in Joon Bug

  Stumbling to the temporary safety of a refuse-bay, the deep, square cubby designed to conceal huge refuse bins for the recycling plants, Shock huddles in the damp and the darkness. Listens with growing despair to the hubbub boiling in the inner city. The muffled thud of footsteps can be heard nearby as security forces, guided by sec-drones, hunt him down in the maze of service-alleys between ’scrapers.

  They come close then veer away, making him lightheaded, a potent brew of fear and anxiety. If it gets any worse he’ll pass out, and then what will happen? He’s got to get the hell away, right now. Find help. How exactly does he do that? He’s probably on every screen and feed in the known world, and his avis are unmissable.

  Puss is giant, covering his entire torso, its glow of gold as bright IRL as it is in Slip. He has to squint to look at it. Then there’s Shark, his Great White. Seventeen feet of muscular gold menace, graceful and deadly, and impossible to hide outside of this bin bay.

  Swimming in close proximity, it shows no inclination to escape, content to be near to Shock, but how do you hide that much freaking fish? Where do you take it? How do you move it without people freaking out? He can’t leave them. They’re both traumatized by their ejection from Slip, their pain tangling with his own, fresh and sharp, but it’s not just that. They’re him. It’d be like ripping half his head out and throwing it on the pavement.

  There’s only one solution he can think of. One group of people who know everything about hiding big secret shit. J-Hacks. Only he’s got no affiliations to speak of, not with any J-Hack group. Sure he knows members of the Quạ, well a member: Heng. He’s the sum total of Shock’s J-Hack connections. There’s no one else he knows. Not well enough to ask a favour like this. An imposition. Heck, he doesn’t even know Heng well enough for that.

  Oh Shock’s fucked himself good, for sure. His futile desperation to return to Sendai promulgated the single-minded belief that he could, that he must, disregard all else. After all, no connections are necessary for a man trying to get home, to find his solitary peace of mind, his escape. In fact, after Mim, he’s actively feared companionship; sure that most of the warped, unhealthy and damaging shit between he and Mim must be directly traceable back to his stupidity. Isn’t everything?

  So what else is there? Who else? Only
two, if he stretches the meaning of their shared gifts to the limit. Two Haunts he knows he can talk to about this, if not exactly request assistance. Feng Ho, who’s dead. And Joon. Owing her favours has got him into more messes than he cares to mention.

  Except, she’s all he’s got. Because he’s not going to Mim. No way.

  “That’s it then, we go to Joon,” he says to Shark, not wondering for a second why it is he’s talking to it. It’s like talking to himself. It is talking to himself, just less mad… well, not really. But it understands him either way. Scary as all hell really, considering it has eyes like a sec-drone, dead and flat, but somehow worse, gleaming with this singular, potent hunger.

  Puss squeezes his chest with a gentle flexing of its tentacles. Agreement. He nods. Sneaks to the edge of the inlet and peers around. The pounding of feet and sirens are many streets away. There’s no guarantee they won’t head back toward him, meaning he can’t run far. A drone could find him easily too, several drones, especially now they’re actively hunting him for the Queens.

  Why haven’t they clocked his signal? Do they not yet know what to look for? Maybe his being snapped out of Slip hurt the Queens? After all, the lock is now in his head. That’s an advantage in cover, but once he’s out, he has no protection at all. Shock realizes he’s going to have to jack a vehicle. But into what vehicle can he fit a seventeen-foot Great White?

  “Limo.” Shock states the obvious, with slow-rising horror.

  Jacking a limo in broad daylight will be one hell of a feat. He can’t put Shark or Puss back into his flash, and even if he could, it’s swollen with Emblem. It doesn’t hurt now, with no interference he can feel, but it’s taking up a lot of available space and growing fast. It’s changing in there, too. Changing itself. Changing him. Fuck, he wants to worry about that, have a full-on, high-pitched, melodramatic freak about it, but he has no time to waste on such self-indulgent shit. How times change.

  Shock looks again at his avis. In Slip, theoretically, they could have operated as a team, although he had never tested it. Could they not be a team IRL too? Even if he’s no longer riding inside them, they’re still his, still him, though he couldn’t tell whether he is in them, or they are in him, he can feel them more and more the longer they’re out. Eventually he thinks they’ll be three minds in one.

  He peers down at Puss, into the golden, square pupils of its eyes.

  “We need to scan for the closest stretch.”

  There’s no indication it’s heard, but one of Puss’s tentacles slides up to Shock’s jack and slips in. A weird sensation, like static, prickling, and a touch itchy, it brings with it a surprise, not pleasant. Puss is female, or identifies as such. What? Why the hell is she she? How the hell?

  Shock’s way past appalled. Couldn’t begin to describe these emotions, but they’re old. Septic. Boils he thought lanced when he left female behind. How can Puss be something he isn’t? Aren’t they one and the same? Impossible that Puss could be this different, this alien from everything he is. His immediate reaction is to reject her, to oust her from him. But the thought is somehow unclean, makes him want to scrape filth from mind and body, so he tries to rationalize, to justify her apparent choice.

  Puss is his original, given avi. Perhaps avis are gendered. How else could he be male and she remain female? Following that thought comes another, even less appealing. Are these aspects of him entirely separate personalities, or somehow both? Have they been prisoners, trapped and waiting for his arrival in Slip in order to experience anything like living? Or maybe his arrivals into Slip are the moments they’ve been trapped most of all, forced to carry him around, suffer his weight within them.

  Discomfited by the notion and unable to continue looking into her eyes, Shock looks away, and recoils back against the wall hard enough to bruise his skull. The world’s been rendered an apparition, covered in gleaming map lines; buildings overlaid with plans, their specs scrolling beside them. Mere silhouettes in the maze, people register as human-shaped blobs of body-heat signature, and between ’scrapers the roads stretch out as a mass of intersecting blue lines crawling with vehicles of every shape and size. Even cut off as they are from Slip, the detail is extraordinary. Mind-blowing.

  Engines float in each vehicle: components clear as day, shining with white and red heat. Chauffeurs and passengers sit inside, wearing a palette of red, yellow and blue. Some Slipping via car-jacks, heads shining silver and gold. Others on IM, trailing conversation. This data should be private, limited to Slip. That it’s not is horrifying. And he can see for miles in this way; layer upon layer of buildings and roads, right to the edges of the Gung, where contoured cliffs stand in see-through opposition to an angry, ghostly sea.

  “Incredible.”

  Puss nudges him. The message is clear: Quit stalling. Embarrassed to be caught slacking, he searches for limos parked close by. This being inner city, there are seven such limos. Two easiest to reach. Shock singles out the one furthest from his pursuers. The chauffeur’s locked into his flash, chatting away. On a break maybe. Perhaps lunch. Shock sees the IM conversation the same as all the others, streams of data zipping away from the chauffeur’s flash. So easy to follow. Anyone could track down who the guy is talking to. Or tap the IM and find them in an instant. Amazing. Terrifying.

  Fulcrum can’t possibly know about this, or they’d be using it to their advantage, and if Fulcrum has no idea then it’s doubtful anyone else does. Mind you, he’s the only soul alive with avis out of Slip. Maybe this is the only way to see it. Good thing that, as there’s no one in the Gung, criminal or Corp, within whose hands this would not be dangerous as hell. Same goes for Emblem. He can’t let the Queens, or Twist, or any other cartel boss, get hold of it. Allow. Fuck that makes him laugh. If he can’t hide, if he can’t find safety, how the hell will he stop them?

  Still connected to Puss, Shock leaves his hiding place and heads for their limo of choice. Plan is, Puss sneaks in and shorts out the chauffeur by jacking into his drive, then unlocks the car for Shock and Shark. His avis are haptic holograms, rendered 3D and corporeal to an extent by linkage with his nervous system, with the extended networks of the Gung’s massive infrastructures. They can interact, but are not physically present. Such is the nature of a sensory illusion made tangible.

  They make it to the limo without trouble and, right up until the last moment, Shock thinks they’ve nailed it. Puss goes in, moving with a swiftness and elegance those tentacles and the lack of water would seem to decry, and the chauffeur’s out cold within seconds, mid-sentence by the looks. Even if Shock weren’t linked to his avis, he’d hear the soft thunk as the doors unlock.

  Smiling, he makes to move toward the limo, sending a note of caution to Shark, who’s to wait until they’re in and the engine’s running to swim out to them and get into the back. That’s when he hears the sirens, hears the shouts. Eyes wide, he looks left and right, finds teams of security guards closing in fast, crowds of people who should know better following behind them. Above the whirring of sec-drones fills the sky.

  “Fuck!”

  He pounds it for the car, pulling out the chauffeur and throwing himself into his place, bruising just about every inch of his right side, sec-drones swooping so close they whip his hair about his face. Lucky they aren’t firing, or he’d be spray-painting the limo interior various shades of human remains. Or not so lucky, because it means the Queens are determined to get him where they want him. He straps in and, cracking in through Puss’s connection, starts the car, throwing on the ignition too fast, giving himself an insta-headache.

  As the engine purrs to life, eliciting an odd echoed purr from Puss, the on-foot contingent of his pursuers reach the car and surround it. The security guards of the inner city don’t carry projectile weapons. They have flash stuns, meshes under the skin of their right hands—similar to a Gamer mesh—with the power to send an immobilising signal flare. Like an EMP for humans. Shock’s got dampers for that but he won’t need them. These limos are
everything proof. All his pursuers can do is shout at him.

  There’s no way he’s surrendering. This bunch of idiots can’t protect him from Twist and co, and the drones will deliver him direct to the Queens. He peers through the shoving, encircled bodies surrounding the car. Shark’s out there in the alley, lurking in the shadows of the refuse inlet, waiting for his signal. The crowd of security officers around the car seem to have begun to notice the shark’s not with Shock, they look around nervously, hands raised ready to send waves, as if that can protect them from seventeen feet of hologrammatic fury. Shock smiles.

  Hey, Shark, he says. Get in the damn car.

  Shark erupts from the alley, its length scintillating in the sun. It’s no less terrifying than the footage of Great Whites in the water, or that old celluloid Jaws, and the effect is immediate. Visceral screams of terror. Chaos of bodies running in all directions, falling fast and sudden as bowling pins, scrambling along on all fours, desperate to run from that yawning, blank-eyed horror. And Shark’s attack is silent, which somehow makes it all the more horrifying. Bodies flying, spraying blood in gouts from gaping wounds. How the fuck is it doing that and why can’t he sense it? Is Shark holding him out?

  Shock bangs on the window. C’mon!

  He can’t believe it. Shark’s a hologram. Yet there it is, looming toward the limo, blood dripping from its teeth, lumps of flesh quivering between those vicious, golden shards. Everywhere there’s blood. Screaming. Sec-drones fire, but the lasers go straight through Shark and into the sidewalk, exploding angry spurts of dust and chunks of concrete.

  Then Shark’s in the limo, bringing a warm, meaty stench to turn Shock’s stomach, and he’s slamming his thoughts down on the accelerator. Sending the limo jackknifing away so fast it damn near leaps out of the road. Drones follow, firing at the roof, the persistent thud of lasers heavy as hail large as golf balls.