The Digital Plague

by Jeff Somers

  I gave him a grin, slight and humorless, and let go of his arm. I turned to Jabali. “Get that? We’re men of action.”

  Jabali looked like he didn’t have any fucking clue what was going on, but he smiled anyway. “Shit, boss.”

  I was playing the role to the hilt because it was what Dr. Terries expected. From the moment I’d appeared behind him on the street, he’d pegged me as the typical downtown hooligan the Vids always portrayed: ignorant, violent, and greedy. And maybe I was, depending on the day, but for now it was just a way to keep Dr. Terries terrified, because if he suspected even for a moment that we didn’t mean to kill him, he’d be impossible to deal with.

  He swallowed and took a deep breath, putting his eyes on my inflated vein. Expertly, he jabbed the autohypo forward and I felt it pinch my skin, the pain melting away a second later as an automatic painkiller was administered. The clear chamber began to slowly fill with my blood, deep red.

  “I’ve seen parts of your file,” Terries said suddenly, glancing up at me and licking his lips. “Some of it is in the clear—not censored by Marin’s office, I mean—and it makes for interesting reading.”

  I weighed whether or not to find this offensive and decided to let it pass without comment. It was good to be unpredictable. Kept the rubes terrified; people liked to learn the rules, because once you knew the rules you could manipulate the outcome. If there were no rules, it was best to keep your fucking arms and legs inside the safety cage.

  “Did you really, uh, did you really interact with Dennis Squalor?” he went on, watching the autohypo do its work.

  I nodded, keeping my face blank. I didn’t like to think of the hours I’d spent under Westminster Abbey, hunting Squalor, killing Monks, and watching Kev Gatz die.

  He waited another moment. “It’s very exciting,” he finally said, removing the autohypo cleanly and holding a small piece of gauze in place over the wound. “Squalor was a genius in his way. Did amazing work in cybernetics and Biological Systems Replacement. Would have won awards, had professorships, if . . . well,” he smiled nervously, keeping his eyes down on the autohypo, “if he hadn’t gone mad.”

  “You mean, if he hadn’t tried to murder everyone and turn them into fucking Monks?”

  He carried the autohypo over to a bank of equipment across the room, shadowed by a jumpy Jabali. “Well, of course . . . still, his accomplishments . . .”

  “Would you like a lock of his hair, Doc? Get on with it.”

  “Very well, very well,” he muttered, inserting the autohypo into a slot and ramming it home. A soft tone rang out and a small screen lit up, text streaming from top to bottom. Terries crouched down and stared at it. “You don’t have a very healthy diet, Mr. Cates,” he muttered absently. “And I would be concerned about your liver function if I were your physician. There—I can see the signatures of the nanobots. Yours are different, however; it’s not entirely clear where the deviation is . . .”

  His muttering died down to a whisper, and then he was gesturing at his equipment, his thin lips moving but making no sound. I lifted the gauze off my arm and peered under it experimentally, then tossed it onto the floor and began rolling my sleeve down.

  “I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with this material remotely,” Terries said suddenly. “Amazing tech. Far beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else. Whoever developed this was a genius. So I’m familiar, you see, with the basic design. I can see where the examples in your blood deviate from the structures we’ve already cataloged, but it isn’t clear why. Wait, there’s a signal being emitted.” He spun around on his stool to face me. “Your nanobots are broadcasting.” He spun around again. “Two signals, actually. One is broad low power, one is narrow-beamed low power.”

  I took a deep breath. Techies. I hated working with them.

  “I could do much better and faster work if I had more resources, Mr. Cates,” he said suddenly, squinting at the screen. “I realize you do not trust me, thus your goon with the menacing air, but if I were in the Department’s lab, we would—”

  “You’re doing fine, Doc,” I said. I had no desire to get any closer to Cop Central.

  “Very well. Perhaps I could at least call in some colleagues, trustworthy sorts—”

  “Afraid not.”

  He worked in silence for a few moments. “Wait a second,” he murmured, leaning forward. “Some of this is in cleartext . . .”

  I stood up and walked over to him, squinting down at the equipment. “What is?”

  “The narrow-beam signal,” he said absently. “Looks like this is freelance work, and the technician signed his name in a signal that is beamed back to an originating point. Unbelievable arro—”

  He went very still. It was the sort of stillness that brought all my instincts up, sniffing the air for a threat. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said in a conversational tone.

  “Doc?”

  He glanced up at me as if remembering I was there. He stared at me and then started to laugh, shaking his head and waving at the equipment. “Mr. Cates, I didn’t realize you were Patient Fucking Zero. Is there anything left in that bottle?”

  I looked back at the table and the bottle of gin I’d left there. “Sure,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  He stood up and grinned around at me and Jabali, who glanced at his gun. I shook my head slightly, watching the good doctor walk unsteadily toward the table and pick up the bottle. He tipped it back and drank steadily for a few swallows, then put the bottle unsteadily back onto the table.

  “Your nanobots are different, Mr. Cates. They are the originators. The builders. They do not attack your body, they simply build drones that are excreted through your pores to seek out hosts to infect. They are broadcasting a weak suppression field which keeps the drones dormant until they have exited your body, otherwise you would already be dead. If you died too soon, you might not infect enough people to achieve the tipping point, so the suppression field guaranteed that you would wander around for days, infecting as you went. Since the field actually has a range of a few feet—perhaps ten, at most—it also means that anyone near you for any length of time sees their own infection go dormant.”

  He started walking past the table, turning to look at me over his shoulder, smiling, grandfatherly. He was probably only five or ten years older than me. “You’re the only reason I haven’t started dying yet, Mr. Cates.” He turned away and kept walking, gesturing blindly back toward Jabali. “Him, too! But if you move out of range, the nanobots inside me stop receiving the field and wake up—and start work.”

  I should have been paying attention to the older man, but my mind had gone blank. I pictured myself walking through the city, inches from people. Standing next to Gleason, next to Wa, shaking Pick’s hand. Pick, who’d lived forever and might have lived another eternity, until I’d come along. I saw Glee, grinning at me. Ooh, Avery’s a father figure. I swallowed something thick that had lodged in my throat. “You said,” I managed to croak, “you said something about a second signal?”

  I imagined a cloud of death around me.

  “Yes!” Terries shouted from the other end of the lab, where he was rooting around in a cart of discarded equipment, cables, and mysterious black boxes. “It looks like a beacon signal, pinging a location in Europe, probably Paris by the looks of the EIP address, but I’d have to dig a little deeper to confirm that. I don’t know what it could be for. We saw that in the other nanobots, the regular ones that all the victims to date have had. Same name embedded in it, too.”

  I nodded absently, my mind a second or two behind each word, trying to catch up. It was as if I was translating each word as I heard it, looking them up one at a time, everything coming to me in slow, lazy waves. Then I focused, staring at the doctor’s back. “A name?”

  “In cleartext no less! Taking credit for the work.” He paused and looked over his shoulder at us, smiling, his teeth white and straight and perfect. “Taking credit for killing us all.”

  Fro
m outside and above us, there was a burst of deep, pounding static, and then a mellow, golden tone, the sound of all the Vid screens clearing their throats. Normally silent, with text crawls, all the newer Vids were equipped for sound and erupted into booming stereo whenever there was an important announcement.

  “Attention,” boomed a generic male voice, pleasant and controlled. It reminded me of the Monks. “By Emergency Decree under Charter regulation Six-six-ten, the System Security Force has declared a state of general emergency. All citizens are requested to remain inside their homes until further notice. Noncompliance will be met with force. Attention: By Emergency Decree under Charter Regulation Six-six . . .”

  The message repeated again and again, and we just stared at each other. A trickle of sweat made its way down my back, slow and itchy.

  “This shit,” Jabali said deliberately, “is beyond me.”

  I kept my eyes on Terries’ back as he continued to rummage. “What was the name, Doc?” I wanted to know who’d done this to me. I remembered being on my knees, a cold gun against my skin, being told that I would be punished again. My hands twitched at my sides. I remembered, and I wanted revenge.

  “Kieth,” he said, reaching down into the bottom of the cart. “Ty Kieth. Odd name, don’t you think? But then those people are always clever. Always clever, and never smart.”

  The name hung in the air. I knew Ty Kieth. I’d known Ty Kieth for years. He’d been there when I’d taken down the Electric Church, and he’d helped me build the beginnings of my organization in Manhattan, setting up security nets and communication systems. I knew the nose-wiggling, bald-headed bastard.

  And I knew he wasn’t who I was looking for. Ty Kieth was capable of a lot of things, but he would never have spent his time building something like this unless he’d been forced to—or been paid an awful lot of yen for his troubles. All Ty Kieth wanted to do was fiddle with shit in his lab in peace. When he’d left New York a few years before, there hadn’t been any amount of money or begging that could convince him to stay: he’d had research to do.

  Ty Kieth in Paris, I thought. Good enough for a start.

  “Thank you, Doc,” I said, waving Jabali forward. “I’m sorry I had to—”

  The older man turned away from the cart, and I paused. He was holding a gun on us. It was bright and shiny, brand-new, and looked like it had never been fired before. It was a new Roon model; to my eye it looked like it cost about sixty thousand yen. I was the richest man I knew and I’d never seen a gun that expensive before.

  Terries held it as if it might explode at any time, but he had his finger in the right place, so I chose to stay still and not take chances.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cates,” he said, smiling. “You’re the only reason I’m not dying.” He shrugged. “I can’t let you leave.”

  XI

  Day Five:

  A Certain Freedom in

  Being Completely Fucked

  Deciding not to make things worse, I stayed still—besides, the doctor’s gun was pointed at me. Jabali and I had more or less unconsciously followed your best practice and kept far apart, and now he took advantage of the gap by yanking out his own piece and covering the good doctor with it.

  “Doc,” he said, “don’t pull a fucking rod unless you mean to use it. You don’t mean to use it. That makes you a shithead.”

  Jabali glanced at me. I didn’t look at him, but I gave a curt little shake of the head. I didn’t want to kill the Doc; I was killing enough people on a daily basis as it was. The wail of the emergency Vid announcement continued to buzz around us, muffled by concrete and glass, and I put my hands up carefully.

  Hesitation wasn’t attractive in a Gunner. Hesitation got you killed, and a feeling of unease filled me like black jelly.

  “I’m sorry,” Terries said smoothly, shrugging. He was used to being in charge, you could tell. He thought having the gun in his hand made him in charge again. A moment before he’d been shaken, hesitant, cowed, and now he was grinning at me as if one of us hadn’t killed nearly sixty people, killed them while looking them in the eye. “If you walk out the door, I am on a rapid countdown to a horrible death.”

  “You have my blood sample,” I pointed out. “You can work with that. You don’t need me to work on this.”

  He nodded. “Perhaps, Mr. Cates. That’s a small sample, though. And we don’t know the behavior of these nanobots. Perhaps they are tuned to your biorhythmic signature and will revert if you are not within close proximity. Perhaps they go inert or self-destruct if they detect they are not in a live biological system.” He shrugged. “Mr. Cates, letting you walk out of here would be akin to suicide.”

  “So, you want to just keep me pasted to your side for the foreseeable future?” I smiled. “What’s next, asking me to tie myself up?”

  Jabali snorted. Terries smiled, and when he started to move his free hand in a shell gesture all my instincts lit up like bright red alarms: Avery Cates, fucking moron. The lights went out. There were no windows in the lab, and the darkness was absolute. As adrenaline sizzled inside me, I let my legs just collapse under me, going limp, hitting the floor like a sack of shit. Two shots burped, the muzzle flashes bright as a strobe, showing me Jabali and Terries in a still life, all blue-gray.

  I started crawling immediately, trying to be quiet. I had the floor plan of the lab in my head, mostly—what I’d seen, anyway. Not measured out, but I could bang against the walls. The floor smelled like disinfectant, and my breath was hot and sour around me as I pulled myself with my elbows, pushing with my knees. This was what I got for being fucking lazy and arrogant, put on the floor by a fucking civilian. This was what I got for hesitating.

  “Mr. Cates,” I heard Terries say, and then Jabali’s gun exploded three times, fast, followed by shoes scraping on the floor and something heavy crashing over. Terries was learning fast that he wasn’t really in charge. He was also learning the golden rule of gunfights: things only counted as advantages if they didn’t make the situation worse for you, too.

  I glanced up, eyes roving blindly, and saw the tiny glowing spots of the elevator buttons, very close. I fixed my position in my mind and started crawling toward it.

  “You should know,” Terries said, his actor’s voice coming from behind me and to my right, where the table and screens were, “that I have a direct link to the SSF, and they are on their way. The alarm was tripped when we entered the lab.”

  I believed this. He was director of something or other, after all, someone who’d actually met Undersecretary Ruberto and probably the all-smiling, all-bullshitting avatar of Dick Marin. He’d had the juice to dispatch three psionics to the Library to gather me up; the cops probably did come when he called. At least, I was sure they did when there wasn’t a general emergency demanding their attention.

  I’ve killed my share of System Pigs, I wanted to say back. If you mentioned my name I’m sure they’re fighting over who gets to respond. I concentrated on not breathing too loudly and covering ground. When the glowing buttons loomed up directly above me, I put my back against the doors, forcing my burning lungs to work slowly, and reached up, seeking the call button. When I found it I pressed it gently. It lit up softly, and I flinched; against System Cops or anyone with talent, that would have been enough to bring a hail of gunfire my way, and I cursed myself silently for being a rusty asshole.

  Nothing happened and I relaxed, pretty sure Terries hadn’t noticed. Behind me, I felt the nearly silent humming operation of the elevator, and I held my gun firmly in my hand, aimed up at the ceiling, moving my eyes this way and that.

  In the System—at least the parts of it that I lived in—all that mattered, all you really had, was your reputation. Two men went into a box, and one got killed and one climbed out, it doesn’t matter if you were bloodied and beaten. It doesn’t matter if you begged and bribed, wept and cursed inside that box—all that matters is that you lived and he died. That’s all anyone ever remembered. And it didn’t matter if you stagg
ered home and climbed into a bottle, wept some more, and had the fucking shivers for a week straight—that shit didn’t matter. He was dead and you’d survived, and thus you had a rep.

  So far, everyone who’d ever come up against me had died. Sometimes it had been pure luck—a stumble, a distraction, a lucky shot. Sometimes I’d been able to cheat, get some inside information. Usually it was just that I had taken some time to recon my surroundings and knew where the hiding spots were, the geography of the place. None of that mattered to the rep: on the streets I was just Avery Cates, who’d never been taken down, who’d left a long trail of dead bodies in his wake. And over time the space that formed around you on the street got bigger, and people got more spooked when you looked at them, and the number of people who wanted to kill you just to say they did it grew. And none of it meant a fucking thing, really, but it was all you ever had.

  Sitting spread-eagled on the floor in the pitch darkness, I felt the crank air being pushed past me as the car descended and thought, Fuck the rep—it’s good to be lucky for a change.

  Now it was patience time again; I sat and regulated my breathing and waited for the elevator to arrive. I felt the car settling behind me and braced myself, ready to stay upright when the doors split open, eyes in the general area that Terries’ voice had come from. Painful white light invaded the lab as the elevator doors opened, but I forced my eyes to search the glare for Terries, finding him hiding behind his bank of monitors, his face a ruddy moon, his eyes squinted against the brightness. I noted the form of Jabali, off to my right and crouched down, and ignored him.

  My hand came up automatically, training the gun on the good doctor, and immediately there was a movement behind me, fast and efficient, and something cold and metallic was pressed against the back of my head.

  “Don’t do it, shithead,” the cop said quietly. “Or I’ll tear off your legs and beat you over the head with them.”