The Verse of Sibilant Shadows: A set of tales from the Irrational Worlds

by JM Guillen

  I wasn’t a half block away before I received the emergency communique, across all channels in breach of Facility protocols. An otherworldly shriek rent through my Crown, garbled with static and electronic noise.

  It was the man in the van.

  Immediately, I had a second communique.

  Asset 108. That hadn’t been a system message; it had been one of the Designates. We require your attention. Please advance to the following coordinates.

  Copy that. I was already on the move, adrenaline souring my stomach as I raced back to the van.

  I hadn’t stepped three meters before the Designates patched the data to my Crown. Because of the neural interface, the coordinates appeared in my field of vision, a burning blue indicator of direction. Of course, it only existed in my mind, but it could be damned useful.

  Telemetry reads local Rationality at negative five and sinking. The Designate’s voice was calm, almost preternaturally so. Negative six.

  Can you give me a direct telemetry reading to my Crown? I was getting close; if the Irrat boy was going to cause any large shifts, I wanted to know it.

  Affirmative. Be advised that non-local telemetry readings may vary by a factor—

  I am aware. Thank you.

  The Designate said nothing. In the upper left corner of my vision a number flickered into existence in blazing orange.

  Then, I heard the screams.

  They were sounds that belonged nowhere in the human world, wet cries of agony and terror, unlike anything that belonged in this world. As I rounded the corner, the van tipped up, over a foot off the ground, as something dented it from the inside.

  I drew the only weapons I had—two pistols with no real upgrades. This type of mission didn’t often call for weaponry, and so I hadn’t spec’d for it.

  Foolish me.

  The scream came again, along with a bellowing roar that made my bones shake. This time, the scream cut off with a sudden, wet finality.

  Does telemetry have a status on the operative in the vehicle? One benefit of the Crown was communication at the speed of thought.

  Negative. The Designate sounded almost placid, as if nothing were amiss. All Crown function has ceased. Asset is assumed lost.

  “Well, gloves off then,” I muttered as I took aim at the van. I had equipped packets that might help me here, things like neuralware that augmented speed and reflexes. As I didn’t want to meet with whatever was bellowing within the van, I drew my Maverick and riddled the vehicle with bullets, hoping to solve the problem before it spilled into the streets.

  That was not what happened.

  Instead, the front window glass of the van exploded outward in a shower of shards and slivers. With that explosion, amidst the sharpness and sound was…

  Bill Iverson?

  The tiny orange numeral in the upper field of my vision slipped to a negative seven as tentacles of mist and darkness roiled from the inside of the van. Accompanying them was an odd whispering sound like something the mad might whisper in the dark hush of night. I could see eyes, furious eyes that burned with a feral hatred as the wisps of darkness coursed along on the wind.

  For a moment, they looked squarely at me. I could hear the whispers more clearly then, words of hatred and sharpness. I reeled backward from the force of it, dropping one of my guns.

  “The EquATiOn is NoT cOmPlEtE.” The venomous words made my ears bleed. I almost stumbled from the weight of them, crushing me. “It is BeCauSE of yOur kINd. YoU wiLl rEPeNt, ManLInG. YoU wIlL kNow LAmEnTATiOn.”

  Then, the abomination that had been Bill Iverson swarmed around me, and the entire world was hollow darkness and fanged mist. Every place it touched my skin was a cold, empty twilight, and the wailings of ten thousand madmen sliced at my mind.

  Then, he was gone.

  Rationality zero re-established. Baselines holding. The Designate’s voice cascaded through me and seemed sweet, almost calming. I realized that I had no idea how long I had been lying on the ground.

  The target is lost. I looked at the van, swearing silently to myself. Do you want me to pursue?

  Negative, Asset. The Designate’s tone was neither encouraging nor damning. Your dossier is complete. I will give you the coordinates for debriefing.

  As I left, I gave the van one last look and shuddered.

  Events like those made me content with sometimes forgetting who I was. I couldn’t live with certain kinds of knowledge twenty-four hours a day for the rest of my life. I’d crack in no time. Billy Iverson was just one example, and there were worse.

  There were definitely worse.

  3

  I stepped out of the alleyway, trying not to pay attention to the large doorman eyeing me as I left. I had been wrong. He couldn’t break me in two.

  I, on the other hand, could make him disappear, vanish, and spend the rest of his life screaming. An entire world loomed behind the one he lived in, a world that he knew nothing about. He did his best to seem tough and formidable, but he was a child when compared to even my simplest assignment.

  “Night, buddy,” I nodded cheerily toward him as I walked away.

  The man did not smile.

  The nightly fog rolled in, and the city glowed with muted light. As I wandered I began to feel my way through the mist in my mind, looking for the initial portions of the dossier.

  Surely the data had been ported to me by now.

  As I walked, my past resurfaced in a blazing flash of memory and recognition. I smiled as I thought about the girl, the blonde I had been trying to remember.

  Anya. Anya Petrova.

  I didn’t have the full packet in my Crown yet, but I could call up parts of the dossier. I would be in a three-person cadre with Anya and one of my closest friends, Wyatt Guthrie.

  Of course they were Assets as well.

  “Wyatt Guthrie,” I mumbled to myself, smiling ruefully. “We’ll be lucky to get out alive.”

  People like Wyatt and Gideon were my real friends in my regular life, and yes, we were quite close, even if none of us could ever exactly recall why we were so close.

  We simply had a bond, one we could not deny. It was wound into our neural architecture, and we all acknowledged it in our own ways. Sometimes, when active, we all had a laugh about the lengths our sleeping selves went to preserve the secret that we were all hiding—a secret that none of us might acknowledge.

  Our lives were vastly different than most.

  That was one reason why I knew I would probably never see Caprice again. She wasn’t one of us. She was a backdrop, an extra. She was part of my life that didn’t actually matter.

  Even if I did ever see her again, a woman like Caprice couldn’t ever be anything more than a diversion. Non-Assets caused problems. If I were to even casually invite Caprice back to my place, she became a liability.

  A danger.

  This was all in my training architecture, of course, stored in my Crown. We were warned against relationships with non-Assets, and our habitual subroutines would push us away from that. After all, relationships created no end of problems.

  If Caprice and I were serious, I would invite her over often. Sooner or later, she would be around when I had a dossier imported to my Crown.

  The world would change then.

  There would be no rhyme or reason, but it would be time for her to go. No explanations. Get out, Caprice. I wouldn’t care what we might have just been doing in bed.

  Even worse she could arrive unannounced as I stepped from my white room. There I would stand, armed to the gills. I might be wearing next-gen body armor, guns synced with my nervous system, or have bags of tri-polymer explosives. Depending upon what Facility architecture I had that day, I might be only partially visible, preternaturally graceful, or have almost any other combination of odd, reality altering effects.

  And Caprice? Caprice would mean shit to me. Caprice would be a problem. Caprice would know too much.

  Caprice would have to be liquidated.

  God damn
, but I needed a cigarette. I stopped at one of the small shops that made Nob Hill famous and bought a pack. I didn’t have any cash on me, but of course my card never ran low.

  I stepped back into the mist and lit up.

  It tasted like heaven. I leaned back against the wall of the shop and simply enjoyed it for a moment. This was probably the last moment of quiet I would have for a few days.

  Funny thing was I only smoked when activated.

  After I crushed out the butt, I walked through the mist, not really paying attention to where my feet were taking me. My mind still spun, but I had learned long ago to trust my subconscious in these situations.

  I knew more than I realized. My unconscious mind had already shifted into active mode. For a bit, I would feel nudges, small intuitions to guide me down the proper path.

  I had trained for this and accepted it was best to go with the flow.

  This time, it seemed reasonable to wait at a MUNI station. I smiled at the thought, sat down next to an older woman, and waited. The sky started to sprinkle just a little, but we were sheltered. The woman chatted me up about the job she hated, all the while obviously wondering at the man in the expensively cut suit waiting for a Nob Hill bus rather than driving a luxury car or calling for a taxi or even a limo.

  But here I was. Why? I wasn’t certain. A reflex, like kicking a stone when I walk or casually fiddling with the worn button on my shirt, brought me here. I knew I had free will; I could stand up and walk away from the station. But this was where I belonged, it seemed. I was already in the groove.

  I checked my wallet. Yes, of course I had a weekly bus pass; I had bought it… When had I bought it? What story had I told myself? I couldn’t even remember the purchase, which was quite typical. I might have been walking around with this pass for weeks now without realizing it.

  The bus wasn’t long in coming. It featured an ad for the newest late-night spy drama splashed all along the side. A handsome actor held his pistol while a beautiful, red-haired woman wrapped herself around his leg.

  I sighed.

  I stepped onto the bus and showed the older driver my pass. He smiled at me, genuinely friendly, a rarity in a city this size.

  I wasn’t alone, of course. The older woman sat across from me and down two. A young couple had claimed the back of the bus, and two skaters sat next to each other but were lost in their headphones.

  I selected a seat equidistant from all of them, only because it seemed like my place. I sat and watched out the window, idly curious at where I was going.

  We had only driven past three stops when I heard a Designate’s voice in my Crown. As always, her connection with me over the Lattice was like a cold river of ice pouring through my mind.

  Even though her words could be coming from thousands of miles away, she sounded as if she were right next to me.

  I will be joining you soon, Asset.

  Understood, Designate. I smiled at a young boy who stood with his mother. He looked a lot like Bill Iverson.

  No. Not worth thinking about.

  By touching my system with hers, the Designate left a lingering trace of her in my neuralware—a fingerprint after a fashion. As I waited, I pulled up her trace in my Crown, mentally perusing the data more efficiently than one might read a book.

  Hmm. We had worked together before.

  We never had names for any Designate—Wyatt joked that they didn’t have names, that they weren’t even human. He’d ask, “You ever see one when yer in the pisser, Hoss? Ever see a Designate smoke or cuss or even get a little mad?”

  This was an old argument with him. I knew he didn’t believe it, neither did I, but Wyatt loved hokey conspiracy theories and delighted in claiming that the Designates were all grey aliens or reptilians secretly here to rule the Earth.

  We laughed at his flights of fancy, which made our jobs easier.

  In truth, the Designates were odd, yes, but they were every bit as human as we were. They simply had more tech, far more than a typical Asset. As such, their behavior became a little different, crisp, perfect.

  Too perfect.

  Of course, that threw Wyatt. My friend was a rough and tumble barbarian, proud to have little class. Poking fun at the Designates was practically sport for the man.

  Add in how little we knew of the higher-tier Designates and their agendas…

  “We’re here to save the world. Obviously,” I muttered to myself, and the young, standing boy gave me a curious look. I smiled at him and then returned to the actual thought at hand.

  I had worked with this Designate on a few other occasions according to the records in my Crown. She had always given me high marks during debriefings and was fairly simple to work with, as far as such things went. However, the last time I had worked with her had been a small catastrophe.

  For that assignment, she had sent a much larger cadre to rural Mexico to take down a small but growing cult, El Camino Oscuridad, The Dark Road. The worst kind of job, we took five Assets with us into the Yucatan.

  We only brought three out.

  The cult was centered around a young Irrat who had the thankfully unique power of granting Irrational gifts to others—at a terrible price. Initial reports suggested that the young man could channel Irrationality and chaos directly into people’s minds, irrefutably shattering their sanity.

  Then, depraved madness would seep into the cracks in their consciousness. Eldritch abominations from the shadows of the world would whisper lost secrets into the minds of the broken ones. They would learn forgotten names that no one should ever speak and master complex rituals and bindings involving creatures that dwelt in the astral tides.

  These poor souls were literally killed and born again into the life of marionettes for the forsaken monstrosities.

  The cult had a truly twisted cosmology, centered around numeric patterns and comet trajectories, but their entire philosophy hinged on one horrifying fact:

  The world as we knew it would soon end in blood and horror and madness. They believed that only one-third of humanity would survive to face that truly blighted world.

  As was typical, the cult sought to stop such a catastrophe, but this involved ritual slayings and beckoning otherworldly abominations into the Rational world.

  They had to be stopped.

  It had been messy.

  The Designate had assigned my friend and mentor Gideon DuMarque as the Alpha for that particular mission, and we dismantled the group in a few days. We lost two good Assets while in the Yucatan. At more than one point, we thought the entire mission might go south.

  In the end, the cult had been liquidated.

  Unfortunately, the young Irrat escaped. As far as anyone knew, he was still at large.

  It was not a good memory, exactly the kind of remembrance that made me pleased to live in blissful ignorance most of my life.

  This assignment won’t be like that one, I assured myself.

  But of course, I had no way to be certain.

  4

  We were almost across town before the Designate stepped onto the bus. She did not meet my eye, did not smile. The Designate walked with an inhuman grace, pointedly ignoring everyone on the bus.

  She was beautiful but efficient, cold. She sat directly across from me and nodded crisply.

  Good evening, Asset 108. The words were cool in my mind, like an early spring breeze.

  Good evening, Designate.

  The Designate was a mandarin woman, with dark hair that gleamed. Her suit was perfect, and she was beautiful, although impossibly distant. She crossed her long legs and looked at her tablet, probably reading the specifications for my dossier.

  As always, the Designates met with me in the strangest places: a bar, an abandoned warehouse, or a greasy spoon. Once, I had met this one in a strip club in the Tenderloin. She had sat across the room at the bar, while I sat with one of the girls. The entire time, she was briefing me through my Crown.

  I trust you have been ported the initial packet.


  I have, Designate. My mission details were already stored in my Crown, but I wouldn’t be able to access the information in full until everything was online.

  You should have full system access within the hour, but I will brief you on the mission basics.

  I smiled, not looking directly at her. Understood.

  This is an atypical mission, Asset. For a few weeks now, Facility 17 has been running deep telemetry testing. They are experimenting with bandwidths that might allow more effective, long-range monitoring of Rationality integrity.

  I have heard. Wyatt had told me. It was a good idea.

  During one of these tests, the operatives detected nigh-terminal levels of Irrationality, intense spikes of activity. Initially considered a systems error when these outliers returned, Facility 17 alerted their superiors.

  Nigh-terminal? I furrowed my brow. That was serious. Someone was bending reality almost to breaking, nothing subtle. Such extreme manipulations couldn’t help but be noticed. With Rationality spread that thin, some abomination could break through into our world.

  Bad didn’t begin to cover it.

  Ambient Rationality levels spiked for little more than nanoseconds, varying between R thirty-six and R negative ninety. Then, typical Rationality resumed, albeit with some lingering effects.

  Such as? I glanced at the Designate. She gave a nearly imperceptible shrug.

  Small gravitational anomalies and variations in local space-time. There are no locals, and the anomalies seemed to resolve themselves. They were little more than eddies in physics and have been classified as non-threatening.

  That was telling, by itself. Typically, small variations like that would be seen as a problem, even if they were short lived. Apparently, they were to be overlooked.

  I frowned. Where was this?

  Sixty-seven minutes southwest of Las Vegas. An unpopulated area in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

  I sat back and crossed my arms. This was an atypical mission.

  Usually I was little more than a courier or maybe muscle if an Irrat went down hard. Situations like the Yucatan were actually pretty rare. Most Irrats had no control over their capabilities: a girl who had some extra-cognitive capabilities or an insurance salesman who always seemed to draw aces, typical, small, class IV stuff. They bent reality without really realizing what they were toying with.