Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  “Don't mind me,” I said as he lined my limbs up on the floor in order.

  “Have I ever?” and he winked. The metal ports on his ankles shone. I felt I ought to say something sexy and daring, but at the sight of them and his seminaked body alongside the grey-green armour a very different emotion came over me. I wished I could touch him one last time before he put it on, and the fact that I couldn't made my heart slide into my throat, so I didn't say anything as he picked up the boot-greaves unit for his right leg. I couldn't see into it, but he could. He peered at it and hesitated with his toe pointed into its dark mouth.

  Now maybe you'll say no, I thought, not caring that if he did I could be someone's next target. But his face looked curious, not afraid, and he slid it onto his leg in a single determined movement. Through the connection I felt his larger, stronger, hairier calf and foot slide down inside my skin. It was so bizarre and unexpected that I made no sound.

  There was a snap and he yelped, “Ouch!”

  The jacks were home. As soon as they linked in, the sensation changed. We shared a lower leg, which he directed and mine must helplessly follow.

  “Og,” I said, in shock, using a pet name for him I hadn't said in years.

  “Yeah?” But he was reaching for the next piece.

  “What does it feel like?” I wished he would slow down. It felt so odd.

  “Warm,” he said. But he didn't say anything about sensing me. Of course, he couldn't feel me. I was getting the suit response and it didn't run two ways.

  “No.” I didn't even realize I had spoken as he lifted his other foot.

  “What's the matter?” He stopped immediately.

  But then 901 spoke, misconstruing my alarm, “All functions remain normal, no alert in progress.”

  And he slid on the second boot.

  I felt my whole, real body for an instant then. The clear feeling that his leg was moving into—through—mine was so acute that my nerves bunched and writhed and sent a huge shock kicking through me. It made me twitch and jump so strongly, it overrode the implant feeds. It felt exactly the same as when someone presses the sensitive nerve clusters in the pairs alongside your spine—a tickling, pleasurable, hateful overstimulation, almost wonderful, but at the same time a kind of pain, and absolutely unbearable; and it felt that way over every minute portion of the inside of my skin every time the suit touched him.

  Snap!

  We shared two lower legs. I could almost imagine us, Siamese twins, joined at the knees. I didn't think I could cope with the whole thing. But how could I tell him?

  He picked up the thigh-pelvic unit. It was designed to be put on like a nappy, closing first at the hips, then down the outside walls of the thigh, before fusing to the greaves. There were four pairs of jack units that closed in sequence. It was going to take a lot longer.

  No way.

  “Og, stop a minute,” I said, trying not to sound hysterical.

  He stopped, holding the unit in front of him, where it swung with the heft of a fresh carcass. “What's the matter?”

  I could cut the sense feed by switching out of the loop until the suit was active. I could tell him what the matter was, and ask Nine to filter the signal. I could and ought to do both of those things, but to my own disbelief I hesitated. In a split second it ran through my mind that this might be the last time he was who he was and that we had a relationship. He could be killed or, more likely, the suit AI would corrupt him. We were already just about on the rocks because of the arguments over this very day ever taking place. Despite its horrific element, this might be the last chance I would have to touch him, body and mind.

  In the back of my mind I was aware of our history, too. We were not the last of the red-hot lovers. Habit, not passion, was our comfort. Neither of us was wholly at home in our bodies in the same way that a lot of overstimulated, VR-exposed workers aren't. We contented ourselves with a bunch of intellectual stuff, but shied away from real arousal. I guess we were both afraid to wake up lust in case the other one got revolted by the animal side of us and fled. Well, that was my fear. And I couldn't deny it, my desire.

  What would it really be like to be fully inhabited by him, instead of the usual simple way? Would our minds coincide when the AI finally activated? Would it be too much, or only a taste of enough?

  I wanted to know what it felt like as badly as I wanted it to stop.

  “Nothing,” I heard myself say. “Nothing's wrong.”

  At the other end of things Augustine paused. “It'll be all right,” he said in his soothing voice, the way he would tell me not to worry over Roy's friends when they came to sit in willful alienation at our kitchen table in Edinburgh, drinking our beer and eating our food, and only speaking to Roy or Jane. Well, they hadn't turned out all right, but I didn't hold it against him now.

  He moved out of my range of vision, modestly I thought, as he took off his shorts and wrestled the awkward, heavy piece into place.

  This was different to the others. A light touch, and the sensation of warmth spreading slowly as the section wrapped around him. Less intimacy than I had expected, but more sense of my own body subtly contracting and expanding to fit his contours. The shock of the nerve jangle was less brutal, too—I was becoming desensitized already. A slow seep of disappointment coursed along my gut, but there were compensations.

  From the waist down I was now a strong, fit man, vigorous with ability. I wanted to flex my legs and feel those muscles surge as they moved me easily around. It was almost enough to make me resolve to start gym classes. But there was no time for idle curiosities like that.

  He put the torso plates over his head, and I lost both breasts and my spare tirette into a sensual warmth of smooth chest and taut stomach. My shoulders were gigantic. As Augustine fixed the plates on and the jacks bit home, I straightened my back and realized I had spent most of my life with appalling posture.

  Only the gloves and sleeves returned me to that blissful eroticism where I could feel him slide inside my skin, inch by inch. At the end I gave myself up wholly to the moment and sensation. Even its almost-pain had become a pleasure to me. It was like being born. A new body, a new power—one I hadn't even known a human being could feel radiating from itself—echoed from the tips of my fingers into every fibre and tendon.

  Snap.

  But he didn't share it. I was alone in my ecstasy. Safe. Sad.

  We resonated for a moment as I absorbed the sensations of being Augustine. With chagrin I had to admit it felt a whole lot better than being Anjuli, at least in the physical. Our minds, of course…just the helm left to go.

  I had forgotten I could see. As he lifted the large headpiece, the sudden movement brought sight back, and with it the metallic stale smell of the service room and the sharp new odour of nervous sweat.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him, feeling his hands peeling back the cowl of my neck and checking the inside of my skull. I could feel the cool exhalation of his breath ricochet softly, and cloud in my brain instead of blood.

  I was lifted, head high above my shoulders like a ghost of the French Revolution.

  “I'm fine. It's all OK so far,” I heard Augustine say below me. Then he hesitated, me hanging over his head. “I want you to know, Julie: if this thing does go wrong, it was my decision. It's not your fault.” He put the helm on and my two huge vertebral jacks bit into him to inject their first fatal dose of AI synthesis. No time for my histrionics routine; I sent him all my love down the invisible band. I don't know if he felt it. I don't think even 901 had a frequency for transmitting that. Maybe it would save a lot of tears if it had.

  As the cowl sealed I was aware of the Armour slowly waking to full operation state from its sleepy tick-over. I felt it build up, then rush through the connections, fast as a flood, dam-busting.

  Augustine's surprised and dismayed “Aah!” sounded sharply in my ears.

  “What?” I demanded, frightened and all too aware of what he must be experiencing, at least in a ver
y diluted way. I hadn't been in full interface when it had grabbed me, after all.

  “No,” he said and shook our head like a dog with water in its ear, “everything's fine. I'm fine. It was a…” and he hesitated, a space in which I could feel the cursed thing rerouting his thoughts so that whatever it really was became merely, “…a surprise. That's all.”

  “Is it…?” I started to ask, but there was no point in asking, because there was no more he and it. There was only the synthetic person created by the inter-absorption of Augustine and Armour. “What's your status?”

  “Combat active,” he replied.

  Not knowing how he was changed was agony, but I would have to guess it as we went along, remaining sensitive to the feed. That's what I thought, anyway.

  “Time to go,” 901 said into the link.

  We stepped forwards and picked up the bag with the friction suit and our only separated weapon, a brilliant rifle, stupidly named but equipped with a small intelligence unit and linked directly to us so that by thought alone we could arm and fire it. It was heavier than I expected, as we slung it into place on a pivot band attached to our waist.

  As we straightened I realized that we were well over six feet tall. Six inches taller than usual for me. We looked around—for weapons of any kind, a strategic assessment I realized belatedly. I asked 901 if it could extend the data feed so that I was in on the AI's thinking, otherwise this was going to be a frustrating shotgun ride in the dark as I merely guessed what it was doing.

  “I'll try, but any large bandwidth connection and it'll start co-opting you as well,” Nine said cautiously.

  “Go ahead, anyway,” I said, and with a small delay of reservation it obeyed.

  “I can't filter that part out,” it advised.

  “I know.” And the full signal sharpened rapidly. I recognized it—or rather I didn't. It was not the same suit as I had worn before. I knew that. The last thing I had expected was any trace of individuation, but there it was. This one felt different. It was greyer, fuzzy-edged, surreptitious.

  “Hey!” Augustine said, all of his own will. “It's you! What are you doing? Are you mad? Switch out of…get…I mean, if you…”

  “It's all right.” My turn to reassure him with comforting lies. “It's just the suit trying to steer you around to its advantage. But now there's three of us.”

  “You idiot,” he managed to get out, but we didn't need to talk now. We rode on either side of it, and thought ran between and through us all like lightning in the clouds.

  “No monopoly on idiots round here,” I said, but it was difficult. The melding of myself with Armour was taking place faster than I had anticipated and it was not the romantic notion of intimacy I had imagined. Within a minute or two I wasn't aware of anyone other than myself. I was all there was. But not who I had been. We were unified, but the price was awareness only of self, a self with strangely unfamiliar thoughts and unremembered memories—but myself.

  “Anjuli O'Connell,” 901 interrupted sharply, “if you wish to be recalled, you will signal me immediately.” An order, but I was grateful for it because it lifted me from the gestalt for a second and let me know there was a way out.

  Before I left I verified the function of my weaponry. As my condition improved and shell respiration became efficient, I stabilized and the offensive units emerged from their storage hibernation in my skin. Hand cannon, missile launchers (over the shoulders), needle guns, glue jets, rope-and-claw spools, starbursts, razor-wire whip, spore-dispersal bombs, gas canisters, and shockwave grenades. All functioning. Internal systems all functioning, if low on nutrients. I powered them up, synched with the gun's processors, and awaited the automatic change of status from Armour to Soldier.

  I became very, very sharp.

  901 let me out of the station and into the cool Northumbrian night.

  Radar and infrared revealed no enemies or detection units besides the remote camera guarding the station, which 901 was dealing with. I expanded to battle proportions and blended my skin colour to the surrounding dark vegetation. It was more difficult to conceal myself in some ways, at over seven feet tall, but there was no dramatic increase in weight or impairment of agility.

  A quarter mile out I buried the suit bag by excavating a deep hole at the bottom of a boggy gully in the moorland. I had only my hands to dig with but they hardened into shovel-like blades with the onset of my intent, and the job was done in a minute.

  When I had relaid the top square of sod and brushed the grass over the joints I took an oblique line towards the mile-distant Ravenkill and followed a hill contour with sensors on full alert, but saw only mice and the odd shrew about their whiskery business in the heather. Thoughts of Roy began to intrude on my vigilance as the data remained steadily non-threatening. Feelings inappropriate to the situation loomed and billowed. I tried to suppress them for a moment, but then decided it was better to allow a degree of split in the cohesion for the time being, rather than force things. Well, I didn't think this; I simply decided it and let myself fall apart into a half-fused flurry of dividing consciousness.

  I was—no, Augustine it was who was angry with Roy for keeping secrets, for being the arrogant overconfident drunk he had become. The anger manifested itself as acid indigestion, bubbling and biting in my own gut. With it came new knowledge (to me at least) of a final message sent in the last days, which said he was sorry to leave our arguments unfinished. I was furious at this as well, since that was all the bastard had to say.

  Augustine had wanted Roy as a friend. Friends did not make that lame kind of good-bye in his mind. He felt betrayed.

  Did he read things from my mind?

  I felt that he did. The insights came as if from nowhere, like dreams.

  He said suddenly, shocked, “You don't love me like you used to!” and accompanying the words was a burst of complicated emotion. I tried to say that it was still as valuable, if different, and express that things did change. It was a better kind of love, the nonromantic kind, but I don't know if he heard that thought, because it was hard to keep a grip on whose was whose. All I remember is the gulf of disappointment he experienced, and my furious frustration with him. Then I lost the thread of myself and we dropped like a stone to our belly to approach the brow of the hill, lizard fashion.

  There was a minute or two of hard going, during which I felt the exciting thump of my double heart powering me over the tussocks and lumps of wind-torn vegetation to the crest. The first sight of the abbey was a charge. A few lights shone out, marking its bulk clearly against the black backdrop of a moonless night at sea. The faint bleed of light in the sky coming from the vasts of Newcastle shone clearly on image-enhance mode. It made the ruin glow like kryptonite.

  Ravenkill was a fake ruin. It had never been a complete, functional building. Its crumbling fan vaults, grass-thickened stinches, and lopped columns were only a few years old. Fragments of the roof had been put up and then knocked out. Walls and filigreed windows had been raised and then aged with erosion machinery rented from quarrying and blast-cleaning sites. Mosaics were buried under thin layers of grass, and the giant arch of the picture window was a deliberate copy of the one at Bolton Abbey. Imported ravens clustered in the shelter of the remaining eaves and on the far side of the structure, where the land became hilly, I could make out the bright little motes of sheep. There were no sheep near the abbey itself, nor among the uneven slabs of the cemetery on the landward side.

  I reviewed the technical knowledge of the place.

  The majority of it was beneath the surface. There was a workable cloister and a vestry aboveground, used for services in the abbey, but apart from that everything the Cosmogenists of St. Paul owned was squirrelled away in a nest of subterranean rooms in the crypt. This was the place where Roy's father had brought his ill-fated wife and children—a fortress that had sold for a song because, until the turn of the half-century, it had been a shallow-site radioactive waste dump. The waste had been removed as part of the Clean-Up
Act, and background radiation levels read around normal, but then most of it was wrapped in a lead and concrete sarcophagus fifteen feet thick.

  I detected no signs of an active alarm system, although a bit of guesswork based on the Cosmogenists’ bank transactions and some data supplied by the Greens made me suspect they had more than a few blast doors up their sleeves. The plans supplied by the Shoal suggested that it was done up like a vault—no data, no biologicals, no machines in or out. Their finance came from a host of allied cults in the Americas and Eastern Europe so there was no doubt they could afford to run whatever they had; it just wasn't switched on at the moment. I asked 901 to clarify.

  “They have some very high-tech links. It's possible they know someone is coming,” 901 suggested.

  I didn't like the sound of that. Sloppy intelligence procedures—there was nothing worse to hear.

  901 issued a blast of irritated static. The thing was far too human. Perhaps I was becoming too machine myself, because I got the distinct impression that it was contemptuous just from the type of distortion in the noise.

  Back on the job I wasn't going to take any chances, not without any buddies for backup. I armed all my weapons and adjusted my power supplies, increasing the strength of the whole shell—the backlash of most of the things would cripple an unassisted human being.

  At standby combat level I broke cover and, with the vital insouciance of the death-defying Thunder Road, began to yomp down the hill, grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of testing myself against whatever they had to offer.

  By the time I took a final leap of some seventeen feet and landed on level ground, I had already figured that most likely what was going on was that they had wind of my arrival and had devised a trap. There was nothing wrong with my sensors, however, and they reported no action. So, going with logic, it was clear that whatever it was, it wouldn't take effect until they had me in the confined space of their bunker.