I tense up at the sight of a wiry, jittery mutt with crusty eyes and blood-tinged foam on its lips. “You don’t want it with me, Phaighsdeaux. Beat it!”
Like that’ll work. The hell-hound charges at me and I blast him into cat food with my bone saw.
There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
The quote comes to me as I advance towards the light, and I let my weapon speak to anything that moves in the woods. I get that predator’s watching you sensation and the hair on the back of my neck bristles to attention.
I spin around, and with a brrrt – brrrt here and a brrrt – brrrt there, I conduct a little reconnaissance by fire on my back trail. Hopefully, my guardian faun-angel will get my six as I check my eleven and my two.
Nope, not a thing. With no enemies to zotz, I push forward.
My field of vision narrows; the forest around me seems to recede. Everything is two shades darker than pitch black now, as if someone has sniped the moon and strangled the stars. Still, that faint light ahead beckons me forward.
I lift a shaky hand and equip my Reaper skull, item 551, and strap it to my head.
Grid lines galore, I suddenly have the developer view of the world around me. One glance down at my hand reminds me that no matter how real this feels, I am not human at the moment. No veins, no bones, nothing under my skin but interconnected digital fibers.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.
Each step forward seems weighted somehow, as if I’m fighting the will of gravity or walking through swamp sludge. Something is holding me back, something is trying to keep me from the light, something is stopping me from progressing. The grid lines whip past me at warp speed as my feet melt into the ground.
About the size of a softball, the radiant light now floats in the center of the gazebo. I slowly, laboriously make my way up the gazebo’s rotted steps, ascending like Tenzing Norgay in a digital hailstorm. Boreal zephyrs banshee shriek in the confines of my skull. Pixelated winds twist all around me, glittering in the feed from my Reaper mask. I press forward and fight my way through the blistering binary blizzard until I finally reach the light.
As soon as I touch it, a gurney materializes in the center of the gazebo. A shield of energy leaps out of its center and forms a protective shell around the gazebo, as if it were a quarantine zone.
Aiden’s form takes shape.
~*~
“You really screwed the pooch this time.” Aiden is back in his typical Morning Assassin outfit, head-to-toe black with a mask to boot, the same duds I saw every morning for two subjective years. We embrace in a totally butch and manly hetero fashion as my Reaper mask disappears.
“Won’t she know you’re here?” I ask as I pat his back.
“She’ll know, that’s for sure, but there isn’t much she’ll be able to do about it. By touching that light, you initiated what is known as a Parasitic OMIB Space. We are connected to The Loop – an extension of it really – but nothing in this space can be controlled by Dolly. Anyway, ask Sophia if you want to hear more about it. Or don’t and just assume that I know what I’m talking about.”
Aiden seats himself on the gurney. It sports an out-of-focus chronoton NV visor, and a mad scientist’s collection of electronics, cables, and boxes with flashing LEDs.
“Parasitic OMIB Space?” I scratch my head. “Is that even a thing? Why do I feel like all this shit is being made up as we go along?”
Aiden shrugs. “Plot device? Duex ex machina?”
“Got it, whatever, just as long as it’ll get me the hell out of here.”
“That’s the plan, Stan.”
“And let me tell you that I am damn happy to see you, and not just because I want the hell out of The Loop. It’s nice to see you back to your old self again!”
The contours of his mask change as offers me his patented lupine grin. “As I was saying before, you really did it this time, dumbass. Once we get you out of here, your worries aren’t over. Frances is pissed as hell, as are the other members of your team, especially Doc.”
“Yeah, yeah, I deserve it, I know I do. It’s not what it seems like, though. I wasn’t expecting to get stuck again and to be clear here: I didn’t login expecting to see Dolly. That was something that sort of came about–”
“–I personally don’t give a shit what you do with your time, but I will say this, you sure have put a damper on me having fun out in the real world.”
“How did I put a damper on you?”
“You really aren’t the tastiest crayon in the box, are you?”
An idea comes to me and I run with it. “Wait, if this is a safe parasitic space or whatever you called it … ” I raise my finger to logout. Nothing.
“That won’t work,” he says, “your inability to logout is more complex than that.” His eyes soften. “How is out there, anyway? Still the same old city?”
“Same old shit. There are a lot of bad dudes in The Loop, including myself when I’m in there, and I always get this sense that someone is about to stick me up, or hop out of the shadows and send me to an early grave. Could have used your help, actually. I had a little run in with Scarface Charlie and Tony Clifton. I met them at Hu Jintao’s Pu-Pu Dumpling Express ... ”
“Did you pick me up any of their muffle Trumplings?”
“Dammit, you too? You do know they aren’t actually truffles, right?”
His face hardens. “Really? Charlie sure charges an arm and leg for them!”
“Hate to break it to you, but Charlie has all the delivery boys in Chinatown cram regular old mushrooms in their socks when they deliver takeout. After a day or so, he lets them dry out and boom, you got yourself a stank-ass truffle. Then there’s the mutton.”
“Don’t tell me it isn’t mutton … ”
“Rat meat, plain and simple. Didn’t you ever notice how there weren’t any varmint in Chinatown, aside from the residents, of course.”
Aiden grumbles for a moment. “I noticed.”
“Well put two and two together and you have yourself a muffle Trumpling.” I wipe my hands together. “So what do we got here? You planning to OMIB-port me out of here or something?”
“How did you know I OMIB-ported in here?”
“Lucky guess,” I tell him.
“Well, as I was saying earlier, you definitely have put a damper on my fun in the real world.”
“Since when was this all about you?”
He stands and ushers me towards the gurney. “Ugh. Do you have to be such a contentious asshole all the time? Get up on the gurney, lie down and shut up.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.” I lie down anyway, mostly because I trust Aiden, which is strange to say considering our past.
“I should knife-hand you right in the spleen.” He places the NV Visor made of blurred Chronoton on my head and secures it with just a tad more firmness than is called for.
“Easy, cowboy, you are supposed to treat these things delicately, me included.”
“You still don’t understand what is going on here, do you?”
No Brian Eno tone as the NV Visor comes alive. Similar to a visor in the real world, it begins with multifarious sine waves. A coordinate appears, already set and my vision tunnels.
The feedback starts.
Like stars exploding all around my head, the feedback sluices over me. I get a sense of weightlessness as I’m catapulted forward, through a myriad of holo-realities played out in real time. This doesn’t feel like a normal dive. This doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever experienced before.
I burst through the rabbit hole, flip and flop in the aether, cascade down the Milky Way and spiral up the genome.
When I finally do blink my eyes open, I’m greeted by jittery images of Frances, Rocket, and Sophia. A reticle quickly forms on their faces and adds shape. Scaled numbers line the left and right sides of my vision pane. Items in Sophia’s office come into focus, their dimensions appearing in small num
bers above them.
“Quantum?” Sophia asks, her voice miles away. “Can you hear me?”
Chapter Seventeen
Instead of a man of peace and love, I have become a piece of something.
“It’s you!” Rocket pumps both his fists in the air. He’s in a sleeveless shirt stylized as an ugly green Chrismahanukwanzivus sweater that reads: Axial Tilt is the Reason for the Season. “I can’t believe this worked! Q Bones is back!”
My vision blurs into focus. “Don’t call me Q Bones, it’s Quantum.”
I slowly turn my head to Frances and smile. It’s good to see her and … yup, that’s going to take some work, lots of work, and I don’t need the warning signs on my iNet screen to tell me that mama ain’t happy. “Hiya … ”
A schematic of my body appears on the lower right hand portion of my viewing pane. It’s only at this point that I realize that I’m sitting in a chair and that I have actual arms and legs, unlike Morning Assassin did when he took his RW body.
I scan my hand in wonderment. I clench my knuckles, search my mind for a Frankenstein reference and it comes in the form of hundreds upon hundreds of quotes with text analysis.
That never happened before.
“You … you made me real.”
Not my own voice, but I’ll get used to it. Or it’ll get used to me. No idea how this works. Sophia busies herself noting something on her tablet and checking readouts via a series of lines on a holoscreen. I try to stand. “Wait,” she says, “I’m not finished. You were right Frances, we should have restrained him.”
“Ladies, please, let’s not start that up until a bit later.”
Rocket laughs. The Dream Team gals do the synchronized eye-roll-head-shake-heartfelt-sigh-of-male-induced-exasperation.
It’s good to see that I still have my borderline asshole wit in my new body. My iNet screen, or whatever the hell a Humandroid’s vision pane is called, registers a subtle change in Frances’ heartbeat, evident in coloration on her face and her sudden shortness of breath.
“Is Doc on the horn?”
A message appears on my vision pane.
Doc: You betcher ass I’m watching.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“A little over a day,” Sophia says. “The digital coma hasn’t started yet, which differs from the last time you were stuck. It may start in the future though, so we really need to get you logged out. That is, unless you plan to stay a Humandroid for the rest of your life.”
I flitter my fingers as if I’m playing a piano, testing the limitations of my newfound body. I stick my tongue out and lick my lips, which actually makes them wet! I bite my teeth together, twitch my nose, and shift my eyebrows up and down, try to flex my muscles. I notice that there is a small line across my viewing pane, indicating my charge level. Currently at 88%, which ain’t too shabby. Being in the droid’s body reminds of being in my avatar, yet there is something different about it, something more … hollow. My avatar truly feels like an extension of myself; this feels like I’m wearing someone else’s skin.
“Where’s my plug?” I ask. “And don’t tell me that it’s where the sun don’t shine.”
Sophia gives me a funny look. “Your what?”
Doc: You charge by resting in an artificially lighted space. Robosynthesis, invented by Dr. Hewman. If you want to know more, go here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Me: You angry at me, Doc?
Doc: Should I not be when you carry on like a lovesick teenager and get your stupid ass stuck in CN again just to go see your glitchy, unstable, source code-damaged former sigother, right when there’s serious, real world shit going on and we need all hands on deck?
Me: Well when you put it like that ...
Doc: How else am I supposed to put it? Y’know, I’m more disappointed than I am anything else. I thought you’d be more responsible, have better judgment. You need to seriously get your shit together and get with the program. It’s like you’re trying to do a PSA of what not to do.
That hurts. I’d rather have him yell and curse and scream than tell me I’ve now dropped to PSA levels.
“My bad,” I say under my breath, but since I don’t have good controls over my volume, it comes out at a conversational level.
Something wicked this way looks; steam practically puffs out of Frances’ every orifice as she gives me the Mother of All Stink-Eyes. She jams her finger into my chest and Sophia catches her hand and moves it away.
“Easy with the merchandise!”
Frances throws her hands to her side. “Why the hell did you go back there? HOW COULD YOU!?”
Her eyes flare as Rocket gently places his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s give him a moment to adjust before we question him.”
“A moment to adjust!?” Frances sweeps Rocket’s hand off her shoulder. “You think he needs a moment to adjust? After what he’s put us through, we SHOULD HAVE just let him stay in CN, The Loop, WHATEVER the hell you call it. But you,” she turns to Sophia, “decided to make him part of your little experiment and now we have to – I have to – look at him in some other … creature’s … body!”
Frances’ vitals are off the charts and oddly enough, even though I should be feeling some sort of emotion, or at least an increase in my blood pressure, I’m coming up short. Sure, I feel guilty, but I don’t have any other attributes generally associated with guilt. No urge to look away, no clammy hands, no change in posture.
This newfound calm gives me a chance to analyze the look on her face. Yes, there is anger, but the longer I stare, the more I notice how much of her current rise in temper is from disappointment and fear. I’ve truly let her down and even though now isn’t the time to admit it, she was worried sick about me. The girl I saved from a Dune Proxima world and the woman who later become the one who helped me logout, who took care of me while I was nothing more than a meatsack – I want to feel remorse, but none comes. I’m left feeling emptied, hollowed out, trapped in this husk of a Humandroid.
“He’s not a creature,” Sophia says as she completely fails to cue in on Frances’ volcanic anger. “He is a Humandroid, a Humandroid named Evan, specifically.”
I turn to Sophia. “Are you telling me that this body is Evan’s body, my Humandroid PTSD/FDA Monitor?” I touch my chest and my face; nope it doesn’t help, but it seems like the most human thing to do.
Sophia nods. “You wanted to bring him to our team and Frances put in the request. Remember?”
“I’ve never seen something pass through so quickly,” Rocket adds. “We must have some friends in the FCG.”
Doc: That would be my doing, and they’re not friends, they’re people who owe me favors. No one has friends in the Federal Corporate Government; only people that owe them favors.
“Anyone have a mirror?” I ask.
Rocket grabs the same makeup mirror that Aiden used. He holds it for me, and instead of Mrs. Hughes beautiful baby boy, I’m met with the reflection of a thin droid with dark brown hair parted to the right. My wardrobe consists of a pair of red boxer briefs, and with a quick swipe of my palm, it becomes abundantly clear that I’m as smooth and unaccoutered as Malibu Ken, which is much more disheartening than I thought it would be. Also, I look like a total dork.
“So are you going to tell us what happened?” Rocket blurts out. “I mean, I know you got stuck, but what actually happened.”
I look from France’s angry mug to Sophia, who is totally into her Dr. Mel Practice persona and focused on her note taking and monitor readings. “I should be recording this,” she says, “but Doc told me I couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“You really want to know what happened?” I ask Rocket.
“Yes!”
I show Frances my hands. “You don’t mind?”
“Now all of a sudden my opinion matters?” She rolls her eyes and huffs. “Whatever. I’m not even going to pretend that I’m okay with any of this. Go ahead, tell him.”
“Long story long: I logged b
ack into The Loop to see how things were going, you know, just to get my feetsies wet. Come to find out that everything is screwy, topsy turvy. This was the night before we found Luther. Also, there was this killer clown named Nicky the Wig, who was one bad mofo. He had taken over as the NVA seed and he quickly made sure to put the kibosh on yours truly.”
“Sounds exciting!” Rocket enthuses. Frances offers him the choiciest of elbows right in his side. “Hey!”
“Being the murderous schmuck that I am, I logged back in to stuff the clown back in the clown car, you know, give him a piece of his own medicine. Nicky the Wig kidnapped me and forced me to equip the NVA Seed, which caused Dolly to spawn. Well, she put a stop to all the funny business and she restored the world to its former … well, glory isn’t the right word but you get the picture. Anyhoo, Dolly told me to log back in after she repaired the place.” Before I continue this story, I turn to Frances. “For the record: I didn’t originally log in to see Dolly. She wasn’t there in the beginning. I was just feeling a bit nostalgic. Nicky was though, and he’s the one that brought her back. So if you want to blame someone, blame the killer clown.”
I can tell by the look on Frances’ face that she ain’t buying it. I wouldn’t buy it either if I were her.
“To finish my story, and this was my bad here so this is me owning up to it: I logged back in to see how Dolly had fixed the place.”
“And to see her,” Frances points out.
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s one way to put it. We got in a big fight because she wanted me to stay in the world, so she put up a barrier around her hotel and removed the logout button.”
I don’t tell her what the fight was about, this is neither the time nor the place. Truth of the matter is the fight was about Frances. Euphoria is the bee’s knees, and I get it, I’m an idiot regarding what I’ve done, but if I ever want any semblance of life, and I’m talking real life here, not a digital life, she’s the one who is going to give it me. I’ve realized this, took me long enough, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Cyber Noir Redux: (Book Six) (The Feedback Loop 6) Page 18
