Stranger Souls

by Jak Koke

  His body was very different in the memory, fat and weak. A body that broke into a sweat just standing up. One that was addicted to rich food, ate constantly, and smoked cigars that were very expensive and strong-smelling.

  The memory snapped into place. An experimental chamber. Bright and smelling of blood. Dark and forbidding liquid swirled and bubbled in a cylindrical vat next to him. He stood on a scaffold, about three meters up, level with the top of the tank. Attached to the ceiling above were heavy fiber-optic cables looping down like thick arteries.

  A technician in a Universal Omnitech labcoat sat at the monitoring console at the base of the vat. And another bent down to attach the wide canvas harness through his legs and around the huge girth of that body. Two more tested the dark saline in the tank.

  His heart labored in that flabby chest as he waited to be lowered into the huge cylinder that would be his life-support for the next few weeks as he underwent an experimental treatment. Gengineering to repair the SLE, systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease that was eating up his tissues.

  The cable grew taut on the harness, lifting his weight from the scaffolding like a cow to be processed. He felt like a brain trapped inside defective meat. Meat that had been going steadily bad for six months. Ever since a slight pain had blossomed in his right knee, then had grown into unbearable agony over the next three days.

  The pain had spread quickly to his other joints until he couldn't move. His doctor had told him that he had severe systemic lupus, that his connective tissue was disintegrating.

  His immune system was destroying his own body tissues. He would be lucky to walk again. He had fired that doctor.

  The disease had worsened, spreading from his cartilage to his bones and from there to his muscles and organs. Until finally, his new doctors gave him six months to live. The pain was unbearable, and the doctors said they had never seen anything like it. It was the worst case of SLE in history. They said there was no cure.

  He had fired them all.

  Then he had decided to try an experimental treatment by Universal Omnitech. The doctors said the germline therapy was experimental and might not work at all, but it was a chance for life. No one else had even given him that. A fragging chance. He shelled out the nuyen and flew to Houston. The whole process was supposed to take no more than three weeks. And if it worked, he would be completely healed. Better than the original.

  That was his only comfort as he watched his naked legs disappear into the dark liquid. A pretty technician double-checked the connection of his datajacks and his blood-exchange systems for the last time. Then he took his last breath before the saline flowed up over his head and filled his lungs.

  The Matrix appeared around him, the virtual space he was used to by then. A rendered home laid out like his mansion in London, very high-resolution. He couldn't feel his physical body at all.

  He didn't realize until much later he would never feel it again. That he was stuck in the vat forever. Stuck in the lonely virtual halls of his mansion.

  The therapy was supposed to repair his immune system and regenerate the damaged tissues. And it had worked brilliantly. But the side effects nearly killed him. When three weeks were up, he learned that an unforeseen synergistic reaction between the regeneration therapy and his disease had caused his tissues to dedifferentiate, becoming cancerous for a while before they took on new forms. Becoming something else.

  Muscle cells differentiated into bone and skin. Intestine cells became fat and kidney and muscle. The doctors were able to slow the process, but it was too late to fix it. Too late. They told him he would never leave the vat. He would never breathe in the real world again.

  All the doctors could do was improve his Matrix connection. He continued with his life. He wasn't going to let anything slow him down. He still owned a hefty portion of Aztechnology, not to mention various holdings in many smaller corporations, including a significant chunk of Universal Omnitech. He would be damned if he'd give up on life.

  Now, standing over the sink in the clinic's bed chamber, he touched the button that turned on the light over the mirror. Am I finally out of the vat? Perhaps.

  The face looking at him from the mirror was handsome despite the bruises. His eyes were silver-gray and flecked with blue, and there was a line of stitches through the reddish-brown eyebrow that arced above his left eye. There were blackened purple patches on his jaw and neck, some of the bruises disappearing under his copper-colored hair.

  He stepped back from the mirror to look over the whole body. Quite nice, he thought. A substantial improvement over the fat and flabby form he remembered. I'll have to take better care of this one.

  He heard footsteps out in the hall, two people approaching his door at a rapid pace. Urgent. And as the door opened, he crouched down and pressed himself against the wall. Quick and silent, without thinking.

  What am I doing? he thought.

  Two people entered. One was a human who wore a form-fitting white suit, and carried weapons. A stun baton and netgun, he knew suddenly, though he could not remember how. The other was dressed in loose pants and a jacket made of purple silk, embroidered with gold thread. He was an elf, tall and slender with a brown pony tail and arrogant eyes.

  A mage? Again the thought just came into his head, though he didn't know how. But he knew it to be true.

  "Hello?" said the elf. "Mr. Roxborough?"

  He stood up.

  "There you are," said the elf. "Is something wrong? Nightmares again?"

  He thought of the vat. "Yes."

  "Please come and lie down," the elf said. "My name is Meyer. Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

  "No."

  "What was your dream about?"

  He felt compelled to tell this one. Maybe it would help to get it out of his head. Maybe they could help him. "I dreamt I was drowning. I was put into a vat of some sort, and I couldn't breathe." He looked right at the elf, giving him a hard stare. "Is this something that happened to me?"

  Meyer nodded solemnly.

  "Tell me about it."

  "Why don't I show you?"

  The elf put a reassuring hand on his arm, wrapped him in a thin cotton robe to cover his naked body, and escorted him from the room. The hallway outside was brightly lit by overhead fluorescents. White and black tiled floor, white walls. There was an almost antiseptic air about the whole place.

  They passed what the elf described as recovery rooms, where the people who came here for surgery were allowed to rest while they healed. It seemed that every one of the patients was here to get some sort of metal implanted. The feelings he got from that discovery were mixed. Part of him was proud of the clinic as though he had some stake in its performance, but underlying that pride was a sense that there was something deeply wrong with whatever went on here.

  The hall was segmented every twenty paces by a fire wall and double doors made of reinforced steel. Security cameras scanned the hall at these checkpoints, and autofire turrets tracked along.

  High security for a hospital, he thought. Cameras everywhere.

  Nobody else walked the halls except for a few others who wore the same form-fitting white suit and weaponry as his human escort. The other patients were either asleep or behind closed doors. He could hear some faint conversations, though he couldn't make out the words.

  Meyer and the human guided him to an elevator. Upon entering, Meyer looked into a small glass port on the steel control panel as the machine scanned his retina. A second later a few previously hidden buttons lit up on the panel.

  Meyer pressed the one marked B 5-Roxborough, and the elevator began to descend.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "You must realize that you aren't complete," Meyer told him. "Part of you is still inside the tank. We're taking you to see that part."

  A chill took him as the doors slid open, revealing a dark corridor. Security cameras and autofire drones scanned them. He pulled the thin robe tighter around him, but the chills did not a
bate.

  The hallway was raw duracrete and very thick, probably enough to withstand a small tactical nuke. Fluorescent lighting hung on metal posts embedded into the duracrete ceiling. There was a short open section that ended in a door. Again, Meyer had to submit to a retinal scan to get them through, and on the other side were two guards standing alert, ready to draw weapons.

  The guards wore tan uniforms over body armor with black and red jaguar-shaped patches at their shoulders. Their heads were completely shaved and they had no visible ears, just tiny chrome dots on the sides of their heads. Their eyes were covered with dark violet glasses that were jacked into their skull through a microthin wire. The wide area behind the guards was blocked by floor-to-ceiling fencing, through which the only access was the door between the two guards.

  Behind the fencing stood another guard, a dark-haired Hispanic woman without any visible cyberware. Another mage.

  The guards took a drop of blood from each of the three of them, pricked from the tip of their ringers. The blood soaked into a strip of paper and into a scanner mounted next to the door. While the scanner checked their DNA with the files on record, the guards searched each of them for weapons. The search was a formality only because they had already been scanned by the SQUID that Ryan had noticed in the hallway. The SQUID was a quantum interference device, and it would have picked up any weapons and any cyberware.

  How do I know all this? he wondered. More memories?

  After a few minutes of unpleasantness, they were through. The elf turned to him and explained. "We can't be too careful," he said. "You're one of the major shareholders of Aztechnology. You're responsible for making decisions that affect millions of people. Your life must be protected at all cost."

  As he took in the details of the room, the door clicked closed behind them. A series of large plexan tanks lined the semicircular wall. There were twelve in all, black tanks about five meters high and cylindrical, about half as wide as they were tall. Machinery hummed and pumped near the base of each vat, and a veritable spider web of fiber-optic cables spread across the surface of the tanks, connecting to sensors and probes. Two catwalks provided access, one about halfway up, and the other at the top where more cables, thicker this time, plunged into the apex. Matrix connections, he knew suddenly.

  Lights illuminated only four of the tanks, those in the middle. The machinery and electronics on the others remained off. A bored-looking human technician in a white lab coat unjacked from a terminal as they approached. Another tech watched them from the topmost catwalk.

  "Can you depolarize the tank?" the elf asked.

  "As you wish," the tech said, turning back to the control panel and tapping a few keys.

  This must be what I was, he thought, watching in horror as a broad window appeared in the side of the vat. The black plexan changing color to become clear.

  Lights came on inside, showing him the results of his disease. Organs and differentiated tissue floated in a soup of saline and connective tissue. Bits of blood and bone, clumps of liver and intestine all jiggling inside the vat like a cellular chili.

  His heart rose to his throat as he watched. His breath caught, his chest pinned. I'm drowning.

  He turned to look at Meyer. Concentrated on his lungs, and managed to take a shallow breath. "Part of me is still in there?" he asked.

  "Yes," the elf said. "This tank, and the one next to it. The scientists don't want to restrict any of your growth."

  Then through the viscera, a large solid mass floated close to the window. Wires and tubes permeated it, and some of the shape was recognizable. The brain, mostly intact, but larger than normal and most of the skull and face dissolved away. Thick tendrils of brain matter floated like wet dreadlocks behind it. The thing turned then, rotating until he could see an eye, large and vein-riddled, peering back out the window at him.

  Bile rose in his throat. His stomach lurched, and he could no longer stand. He fell to his knees and heaved. Vomiting until there was nothing but a dry acidic taste in the back of his throat, purging until his abdominal muscles were sore from the exertion.

  Meyer knelt next to him. "We should get you back, sir," he said. "You're still recovering."

  He tried to stand. The elf and the human supported his arms as he rose to his feet. The technician had polarized the tank's plexan surface, but the image still floated in his mind. The injustice of such a disease. How could I have survived like that for so long?

  He didn't remember much yet, and now he didn't want to. "I want the procedure completed as soon as possible," he said. "I want to be out of that tank."

  The elf smiled, broad and genuine. "We're moving as fast as we can, sir. The progress has been quite good for the first three days, and we just passed a major hurdle. It should only be another week or so."

  9

  Lucero dreamed.

  She was the dark spot in the blinding light. The tiny shell of silence amid a sea of song. Beautiful music on a cracked plane of rock.

  She thought perhaps that it was the voice of Quetzalcoatl singing, trying to cleanse her innate evil. But she doubted that even his power could rid her of the taint, the curse of her blood desire. Her yearning for its power.

  Her addiction.

  That dark stain on her soul refused to be washed away. Uncleansable like blood on Lady Macbeth's hands.

  For several moments of exquisite beauty and terrible pain, she basked in the flow of light and the wash of music. Then, abruptly, her dream gave way to a nightmare. The glorious rush of light plowed over her, shredding her skin like a hard shower of needles. Too much to stand. Overwhelming her in its painful beauty, its agonizing perfection.

  It was gone and she rolled over, consciousness hitting her like a sledge. The cold granite of the altar pressed against her back and neck as she rolled into a fetal position. The air baked around her even though it was well past sundown, and sweat slicked her scarred body.

  Lucero's head was shaved and smooth, the only skin that was free of the runic scars that marked up the remainder of her petite body. She tucked her face into her arms and tried to hold back the tears. The exquisite beauty of that place, she thought. Gone.

  "Excellent," came a deep male voice.

  She felt a soft cloth fall over her, and magical warmth filled her. "You have the gift, Lucero," the man said. "You are the paradox that can love both the darkness and the light. Now get some rest. You will not be sacrificed."

  Lucero looked up at the face of Serlor Oscuro. He grinned down at her and clasped his hands together in chilling glee, a maniacal glint in his black eyes.

  She had passed the test, a trial that so many before her had failed. She would not be sacrificed.

  Hands supported her, urging her to stand. Servants in drab robes helped her down and led her from the sanctuary chamber at the center of the San Marcos teocalli, out toward the priests' residences. How long had it been since she had last seen the interior of a sanctuary?

  Since the last Blood Mage Gestalt ritual, when her magic was still strong. At least several months ago. Now the power was all but drained out of her, swallowed up suddenly when she extended herself too far. When the backlash of the Gestalt's ritual had crashed down on them, and she was too weak to withstand it.

  She had collapsed from the loss of blood and the ritual's drain. She had felt her magic slip away then. Not all of it, just a little. But that little was too much. It weakened her so that she could no longer cast the high-force spells, could no longer provide enough power to the Blood Mage Gestalt. There were many initiates awaiting their own chance.

  She had expected to be sacrificed like the other burned-out Blood Mages before her. Now it didn't look like that was going to happen. She was not going to be allowed to die for her sins. For her taint. What was going to happen to her? What did Señor Oscuro have planned for her? She didn't know.

  The servants left her alone in one of the antechambers adjacent to the sanctuary. She had a view of the altar and of Quetzalcoatl's stat
ue arching over it, gold and blue feathered wings spread wide. And on the other wall were sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. Outside, Lucero could see the excavation under the glowing spring water. She could sense something there, something pure and powerful. Something like the song and the light.

  Perhaps she could be happy here for a while. Perhaps she would get to visit that place in her dreams again. The place where the stain on her soul was almost washed away by the beautiful singing. Almost.

  13 August 2057

  10

  Jane-in-the-box surveyed the virtual space of her command center. A square-shaped room with riveted stainless steel walls surrounded her. Six sides of computer-generated reality, each face representing one of her datajacks. Each representing a connection, a channel to another world to which she could switch. A die-shaped virtual gateway created by the network of cyberdecks and hosts in Dunkelzahn's Lake Louise lair. Working for an ultra-rich great dragon had its bennies, especially when the dragon was a technology freak.

  Jane's meat body rested comfortably at her console, six fiber-optic lines connecting the datajacks on the back of her skull to the command ports in her terminal. But her body was just bones and sluggish flesh, and right now it felt nothing, it saw nothing. The cyberdeck cut off her normal senses in favor of those provided by her MCPC—Master Control Processor Chip.

  Time to move the chess pieces, she thought. Time to extract Quicksilver.

  On the surface of five of the steel faces shone images, four of them headcam shots from her team. The fifth face, below her, showed a shining gold door, the gateway from her private virtual space to the Matrix—the electronic universe of the world-spanning computer network.

  Her team was deep in Aztlan, on site at the delta clinic in the Panamanian jungle and waiting on her word. She checked the vitals of each of them. Kaylinn Axler was the on-site team leader and highly competent from years of experience. Jane registered statistics like heart rate and respiration that accompanied the visual and audio. Axler even had a cybernetic olfactory receptor so Jane got scent from her as well. Right now, the clinic room smelled like a combination of aerosol lubricant and antiseptic.