by JT Lawrence
Three frangibles rocket out of the weapon, and all of them connect with the greasy man: face, chest, thigh. Designed to come apart as soon as they leave the barrel, the bullets separate into a spiralling core and three sharp petals. The lead alloy blooms in the air, as if breathing, then embeds itself in the flesh of the target.
The man roars, confused as to why there is so much pain, like a rolling flame over his body, and tries to pull out the strange bullet that has bitten into his cheek. This causes more damage and he shouts again. His other wounds bleed oily black through his dark clothes. Angry, he wants to swipe at Seth, but his limbs are contracting with the pain, and he lands on the tar. While watching him writhe, Larry advances, lifting his bat, preparing to swing. The woman with the denim-dyed hair flanks him, her spiked knuckleduster glinting in the afternoon light. Seth fires at the barbarian and gets him in the chest and stomach. Larry doesn’t acknowledge the bullets at all; he just keeps coming. Seth realises the man doesn’t feel pain, and he has to rely on his agility alone as the bat comes rushing for his head. He sidesteps Larry and manages to shoot two of the others as they advance. They roll away in pain. The bat comes for Seth again, and he gets out of its way just in time. There’s a sudden sharp pain in his lower back, and a wet sensation. Seth turns around to see that the woman has slashed him with her spikes. Before he can respond, she punches him in the stomach with them. It’s like being stabbed four times at once, and he shouts in surprise, looking into her dilated irises as the consequences sink in. Satisfied, she pulls them out, and it feels as if she’s taking his organs with her. Then there’s a loud thump and all the air is knocked out of Seth’s lungs. The tarmac scrapes his face. He can feel the bleeding where he’s been struck across the back with the bat, and where he’s been stabbed in front. A pair of boots walks up, and before he can raise his arms to protect himself, they kick him in the face. It’s the loudest thing he’s ever heard.
The naked woman stares at him, as if she’s thinking.
The bat comes for him again, and takes out his left knee. Seth rocks and shouts in pain, coughs up some blood. There are five of them now, surrounding him—a circle of tormentors. They’re all in the sky, and he’s eating dirt. They discuss among themselves what they should do with him, if there’s any more fun to be had before he flatlines.
“You know what?” says the barbarian. “I feel like watching a show.”
Chapter 84
Brain Bleach
Kate stumbles out into the corridor with its gentle, stuttering light and examines the doors. She’s already seen too much violence in her life, too much pain. She’s going to have to summon up all the courage she has to open another door, never mind the number of doors needed to find Silver. And, when all of this is over, she promises herself, she’ll go in to a nice padded room somewhere in the mountains. One of those places that remove unwanted memories and lets you download happy ones in their place. Brain Bleach, the dubsters call it.
There must be more than twenty identical doors here. Kate walks down the passage, trying to get a feel for which one could be the right one. She calls up her interface again, and now that it’s on, when she looks at a door, a green holotag comes up.
DNA CASINO WITH TOPLESS BARSTAFF, says the one she’s standing near. She keeps moving down the passage.
PLASTIC SURGERY PRACTICE IN VIVO XXX-HOT MODELS
ROMAN FEAST (WITH LIVE ORTOLAN) AND SODO-ORGY
BDSMXV SEX DUNGEON X-GRAPHIC DUBCON & OFF-LABEL BE WARNED 21+
Kate steps back, to see which one she’s already visited.
ROBO DEATH MATCH ART CIRCUIT AUCTION
She keeps walking, reading the green tags on the doors as she goes. When she finds a red holotag, she stops. Does that mean the room is not vacant? It doesn’t say what the immersion’s theme is. She puts her hand on the doorknob. Metallic, cold. Canary-coloured adrenaline kicks her in the head. Kate takes a deep breath and opens the door.
Chapter 85
Hansel & Gretel
White Mezzanine, 2036
It’s not a door but some kind of portal to another place altogether, because now she’s standing in a white passage and it’s clean and beautiful and there’s light everywhere.
Yes! I’ve reached the next level. But then she’s immediately worried. Has she really reached the next level? Is she closer to finding Silver now? Or has she done something wrong and she’s back at the Lipworth Foundation?
It’s all the white that’s bothering her. This is what the Lipworth looks like, but then she interrogates the setting further: She kicks a wall and it doesn’t hurt. She runs down the corridor and she’s so full of energy and stamina she feels as if she can run all day. Indeed, she’d have to, because it looks like an infinity corridor with no beginning and no end. There are strips of mirrors, too, silver reflecting white. She stops in front of one, inspects herself.
Kate has her mane of red hair, slick-styled and shiny, and her scalp is uncut. There’s no more pain. Her wrinkles are gone, her eyes have a cosmic sparkle. She lifts her damaged arm to see she has full mobility, and it no longer hurts at all. Not only that, but she’s wearing some kind of body-hugging superhero catsuit in ombre orange. The colour pops against the white and it’s as if it’s feeding her body energy, like when you lace up your runners tightly and it makes you want to sprint. She can’t stand still; she needs to move. Needs to hurry. She moves away from the mirror, sees entrances to more passages, all identical.
“Silver?” Kate knows she has to find some way to step up. What is she missing? “Silver?”
The dark orange. Her brain is trying to tell her something, but she’s removed from her clear, real-life thinking. It’s like there’s a filter on her thoughts down here—up here?—wherever she is, and she can’t grab on to the nagging idea that’s trying to present itself.
Think!
The burnt orange is deja vu, right? So what is familiar about this moment? It’s the white corridor.
Lipworth. We’ve been through this already.
But, no, it’s not that. The memory isn’t of the Lipworth Foundation. It’s a lot deeper than that. Further away, but more entrenched.
Of course, when she’s got it. Of course. It’s so obvious. It’s the white interior of the Genesis Project headquarters—also subterranean, also bright white. But what does it mean? Then she thinks of fairytales: of Silver stuck in her sleeping body like Snow White. Of the thorny rose maze of the Luminary. Of the one she knows best, the one she lived through, herself, and still has the book James gave her: Hansel and Gretel. Kate and Sam. Toaster waffle roof tiles. She thinks of the breadcrumb trail of scuffmarks that had led her out of Genesis and saved her life, and looks down at the floor. Kate doesn’t notice anything but white, but then she squats and sees them. Tiny multicoloured dots. It’s weird because they’re not part of the floor, not really. It’s like her neural lace is projecting her synaesthesia onto the floor, as if she feels lost but something in her brain knows the way.
Kate follows the pixels for a while and, just as she begins to second-guess her fairytale theory, the breadcrumbs veer left, and after a while they lead her sharp right, and then something tells her she’s close and she calls: “Silver?”
Kate hears someone’s voice and stops in her tracks. Someone is there.
Silver?
“Mom?”
“Silver! I’m coming!” Kate runs towards the voice but there’s just white mist everywhere, and she can’t see where she’s going. She trips on air, somersaults and falls, but it doesn’t hurt. She doesn’t feel anything but relief as she scrambles up again to follow the sound of her daughter’s voice.
“Mom!” shouts Silver, and there she is, on the other side of some kind of thin white membrane, a biolatex film. Kate can see the outline of her hands and elbows as she pushes through the screen. She starts pushing too, tries to tear the elastic with her nails, her teeth. It tastes like the rubber of soft-pop balloons. Kate thinks of the Gordhan, of Mally in a body cast, of
Solonne.
“Can you cut it?” asks Silver.
“Cut it? With what?”
“Don’t you have anything?”
“What do you mean? No.”
“Look at your weapons.”
“Silver,” Kate says, touching her forehead against the screen. She wants to say: my silly girl. I didn’t bring any weapons.
“Look down, Mom. Look at your utility belt.”
And she’s going to say I don’t have a utility belt, but then she looks down and she does have one. It’s the knife she picked up at the death match, which she pulls out of its sheath and stares at. A thought nags at her: this is all too easy. Finding the Atrium, finding the chipcard, then the knife, the portal, the breadcrumbs, and now, finding her daughter. But she doesn’t have time to waste so she ignores the idea and goes with her good fortune. Maybe it’s her virgin clover. Maybe it’s something else.
“Stand back,” Kate says as she slices through the white.
Chapter 86
Car Carcass
Innercity
Johannesburg 2036
The gang hauls Seth up and strips his clothes off with a hunting knife.
“You’re going to do it,” says the barbarian with the bat.
“Do what?” asks Seth, but he already knows the answer.
Two of the gang members push the naked woman face forward over the bonnet of a burnt-out car carcass and spread her legs with coarse hands. The front of her body is stamped with the dark residue of the vehicle: white and black; negative, positive. She doesn’t resist, and they step back, dust their hands, and put away their weapons. The nunchux are clipped away, the hunting knife goes back into its sheath. One of the men makes lewd gestures over his own junk while another pushes Seth’s broken body towards the woman.
“I can’t,” Seth says, coughing and gesturing at his dripping wounds.
The woman licks Seth’s blood off her spiked knuckleduster. “I can help you with that.”
The men snigger. One of them has picked up the automatic rifle Seth dropped. He aims it at Seth and motions with its nose for him to obey the instruction. Larry looks on, amused, bat hanging at his side. Seth limps as slowly as possible towards the splayed woman, trying to buy time to think. Every step on his shattered knee sends an arrow of pain up his body, and he’s coughing up what looks like bits of raw kidney. When he gets to the woman, he gingerly levers himself over her. She recoils beneath him.
“I won’t hurt you,” Seth whispers.
His blood trickles on her. One of the men throws a broken bottle at him. “That isn’t how you do it!” and the rest of the gang laughs.
“Hurry up, you cunt,” says the denim-haired knuckleduster. “We’re waiting for our show.”
Seth’s earlier thought, before he was stabbed, was to run; he was sure he could outrun them. Now every step is agony, and they’re bristling with weapons, including his.
I was so close. He thinks of his family, and of Keke. Always of Keke. He knows he should have told her years ago how he felt about her, but it was never the right time. She’s in love with Marko, despite his insane decision to leave her.
He pictures Kate, his better half, his puzzle piece. The kids. God! To see them one more time.
The woman beneath him shifts slightly, bringing him back. She’s saying something under her breath. He can’t hear her.
“What?” he whispers into her neck, hiding his lips from the enemy.
“That’s more like it,” says the barbarian. “Let’s see some action.”
Another piece of debris comes flying at them. It bounces off Seth’s shoulder.
“What did you say?”
The man with the SkyRest gun aims it at Seth.
The woman whispers, “I said get ready to get down.”
“What?”
“On the count of three.”
Seth couldn’t be more confused.
“One,” she says. “Two. Three.”
Seth hits the deck, and the woman spins around and releases her roscoe. The smart steel barrel of the gun pops out of her forearm and she fires round after round into the yelling gang members, flattening them with its firepower. They’re all cut down apart from the barbarian, who seems indestructible. He must have ten bullets in him now, but he keeps advancing. The naked woman keeps firing. Seth can taste the gunpowder. He leopard crawls to where the freshly dead bodies lie and wrenches the hunting knife from the man’s holster. Larry reaches the woman and starts to throttle her. She’s out of bullets. Seth crawls quickly towards the savage and slices through both of his heel’s tendons. He may not be able to feel pain, but he won’t be able to walk without his achilles. Seth expects to see yellow cartilage and bone, but instead is shocked by a flash of silver titanium before the blood washes over it.
The robot barbarian falls down, slamming the woman down with him, and Seth lurches in his direction, knife raised, ready to slit his throat.
The woman tries to stop him. “He can’t hurt us now,” she says.
“I don’t care,” says Seth, as he severs the head from the barrel-chested body.
They pick a few garments off the still-warm dead bodies. The clothes have an evil stink. The femmebot pulls on a pair of dark jeans. Her carbon-dusted breasts are still bare. Seth retrieves his gun, and gives the bat to her.
“Bye,” he says, and starts limping away. He can only shuffle along, anything quicker and the pain stops him in his tracks. He’s still bleeding from the spike-holes in his stomach.
“Let me help you,” she says. Her ribcage drawer slides open.
“I don’t have time. I need to go.” He coughs up more clots and spits them out on to the hot tarmac.
“You won’t get anywhere in that state.”
“I will, or I’ll die trying.”
“Wait,” she says, touching his arm. “Take this. I don’t have anything else left in my medikit.” She hands him an inhaler. Pexidine. Seth unscrews it and gives himself a large dose of the painkiller in each nostril, then pockets the bottle.
“Thanks.”
“I can’t do anything about your knee,” she says. “My scanner surmises that your tibia is shattered and the patellar tendon is shredded, presumably by the splintered bone. You’ll need surgery.”
“That sounds about right,” he says, grimacing from the jolting pain he feels every time he puts his weight on it.
“But that’s not your biggest concern,” she says.
Seth looks at her.
“You have severe internal bleeding in your lungs. As things stand, I can’t tell if you’ll die from the blood loss or the oxygen deprivation. Both seem just as likely.”
“Wow,” says Seth, lungs gurgling. “Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Is there a way to sugarcoat death?”
“Ha,” he says. “Good point.”
The bot closes her drawer, and the skin there is almost seamless. She props him up with a steel shoulder and helps him walk.
“I’ll help you to where you’re going,” she says. “But I can’t stay. I have something I need to do.”
“Thank you,” Seth says. “Do you want to put a shirt on?”
“Do you want me to put a shirt on?”
Seth shrugs, and they stagger together towards the Lipworth Foundation.
Chapter 87
Force Quit
White Mezzanine, 2036
Kate and Silver fall into each other with yelps of relief. Silver’s body is bird-boned and brittle, and it makes Kate want to keep holding her. It feels so real Kate can even smell Silver’s signature scent: white apple flesh, rum and sage. She wonders how long it’s been since they hugged like this. Not since Silver was small, she’s sure. As a toddler, Silver would steal into her room at night and slip into her bed. Mally would do it too, of course. Sometimes they’d even climb into each other’s beds and she’d find them snoring sweetly together in their twin pyjamasuits. She had read something about how you shouldn’t let your s
mall kids come to your bed at night, how becoming dependent on a parent to fall back to sleep would give them insomnia issues for life.
They need to learn to self-soothe, Kate used to tell herself as she carried the small bodies back to their KidKocoons. A stab of guilt when they’d cry in their sleep that they wanted their mama, and there she was, alone and lonely in her own bed; and a stab of guilt when she’d let them stay cuddled up to her, their imagined future insomnia fuelling hers.
Of course, after Lumin she couldn’t give a toss who wrote what in which parenting stream. If the twins padded through to her bed during the night, she’d pull their little bodies as close to hers as they’d let her and they’d sleep with tangled limbs, breathing each other in all night.
Silver’s the first to let go, and this breaks Kate’s reverie. What is this place? It looks like an executive hospital room, but the periphery is wavy, as if the VXR designer didn’t finish the full render. Kate picks up the plate of nutrijelly cubes for a closer look when Silver smacks the dish out of her hand. It clatters and vibrates on the tiles, the jelly-like blocks of soft lego on the floor, reminding Kate again of a simpler time. She moves to clean it up.
“Don’t!” Silver’s eyes are wide.
“I was just going to ask you what it was.”
“Don’t even touch it, and don’t eat or drink anything while you’re here.”
“What is this place?” asks Kate.
“I don’t know.”
“We need to get out right now,” says Kate. “They’re shutting down the grid.”
