Jack froze, his training kicking in, knowing that resisting now could mean permanent injury. The mechanism in his eye socket activated, widening the aperture sufficiently for the filaments to release the clamp on the optic nerve, then pull back, grasping onto the eyeball and withdrawing. His vision flickered, the sight from the artificial eye gone. The room seemed more distant. He blinked and felt the strange sensation of his eyelid moving against empty space.
Growden held Jack’s smart eyeball in front of him, hanging in the air above his restrained body.
“Expensive tech. They must like you a lot. Be such a shame, if anything happened—” Growden flung his arm out, depressing the button on the side of the device at the same time, and Jack’s eye spun across the room, smacking into the tiled wall opposite.
“You bastard,” Jack said, “There was no—”
The words didn’t get out of his mouth. Growden struck again, this time on his unmodified left eye. An awful popping noise as the scalpel from his hand dug through the cornea into the vitreous fluid inside. Fluid leaked out against his cheek.
The scream from Jack’s mouth echoed around the room.
Blackness became his world. He sensed shock from Indira, and a burning hatred from Growden. What the hell?
But the maniac hadn’t finished. A gasp from Indira. Pressure against his chest as Growden clambered up onto him. He couldn’t breathe. The man weighed a tonne. But the scalpel didn’t stop diving into his remaining eye. A tug and then Jack realised the man’s fingers were in his eye socket, pulling at what was left of the organ. A sucking noise. A wet mass dropped out of the socket onto his cheek and Jack howled again.
“Stop it, you’re killing him.”
A slap, but not on Jack. A gasp of surprise.
Blackness. The fire meant he was alive.
Then he dropped into the darkness, the arguing voices around him faded into nebulous vapour.
A slap to his cheek brought him round.
How long had he been out?
The fire from his eye socket hit him as soon as his senses returned.
“Wake up. Damn, it’s hard to know whether he’s conscious or not.” Growden agitated.
“He’s awake.” Indira probed his mind.
I’m sorry. I tried to stop him.
She was hurt.
“It’s time for you to work your magic,” Growden said, and Jack felt the filaments again against his modified eye socket. A mass slid its way inside and a click as the connection was made and the filaments withdrew.
He had vision back; through a dead man’s eye.
“That’s Booth’s eye. He was a little clumsy removing it but Nanosalve is a remarkable thing. Good as new. Now, do your recall and tell me what I need.”
Jack thought the blackness was a better option. There were specks of blood on Growden’s face. His blood.
“Go to hell.”
“There’s still a lot more of you I can remove. I can do it slowly enough to let you feel the pain before you bleed to death. To be honest,” a tongue flicked out and licked a fleck of blood away from the corner of his mouth, “I might prefer it that way.”
“If I’m going to die anyway, why should I help you?”
“You think you can deal with that pain?” Growden stepped away. Jack tracked him. He had another one of those metal spikes and had stood beside Burnfield’s table. The detective was still out cold. “How about your friend? How much are you willing to put him through?”
Jack didn’t doubt he meant it. He closed his eye and let Booth’s memories come to him. Except they didn’t. Not at first, and not how he imagined they would.
“I can see a room.”
“Good start,” Growden said. “Is he telling the truth?”
Indira was standing close. He could smell her perfume, sense her probing. He didn’t try to resist, just let his blocks down.
“Yes. He’s in.”
“The house is empty, almost. He lives here. It’s his home.”
Jack was back inside the house he’d last seen in the simulacrum at the police station. He couldn’t control the direction of the memories and rode as a passenger as Booth sat down on the only chair he had and looked at the artwork in the front room.
“He’s staring at a picture.”
“The fractal inductor,” Indira added. “We’ve been in there. There’s nothing we need in the house.”
“Why was he adjusted?” Jack wondered how much the pair of them knew. From the sounds of it, they’d been at the house.
“His employers needed it. They’ve left something inside his mind that we need.”
“Enough,” Growden spat. “Don’t give him anything more.”
“What does it matter if you’re going to kill me anyway?”
A snort.
“It would save time if you gave me an idea of what I’m looking for.” Jack hoped the lie wasn’t that transparent.
But it didn’t matter. Growden was happy to talk. “Booth Maguire was a processor at an Anthology Storage Unit. He prepared eyes for storage in a remnant vault ready to be sent out to keepers like yourself. I’m going to pay a visit to the vault and send OsMiTech a message. You blasted remnant keepers are to blame as well. If it wasn’t for you they wouldn’t be perverting the course of nature down there. I intend to put a stop to it.”
“So go.”
A wry chuckle. “Not that easy.”
“You don’t know where it is?”
“Not even their workers are consciously allowed to know the location of the storage unit. Part of his conditioning hid it from him but allowed him to find it when he needed to go there. But, once you’ve identified the workers, it’s child play to set a drone on them and follow them. I know where the storage unit is, but it’s well protected. I’m not going to be able to just walk right in there.”
“But Booth could.”
“Booth has what we need in there, his memories somewhere. The conditioning helps him find the place and get through security.”
“Why not take it from him whilst he was alive? There was no need to kill him.”
“I tried,” Indira answered. “The conditioning made it impossible.”
“Impossible for someone like you?” Jack replied.
Indira twisted on the spike sticking into his arm and he yelled. The pain fired off again. He twisted and fought against the restraints.
Growden came back and yanked the spike out of Jack’s arm. The wound went cold, and he saw the blackness again. A slap to his cheek and he refocused.
“It’s not worth upsetting her. She has a way of making people unhappy. Now, tell me how to get past Anthology Storage security.”
Indira’s mind was there again, digging away, reading the memories straight from Jack’s mind as he worked through the recall.
He saw the inside of the pub that he recognised from the night Booth died. Saw Indira sitting at the bar. He dismissed the image. Useless. Further back, walking through the city centre. Commuters rushing past. Shoppers with bags and crying children, and confusion. Booth’s confusion. Running on autopilot. Things becoming a blur. Writing on signs meaningless. Crossing the same street twice, rounding a corner he’d been around minutes earlier. Drones above, keeping their distance.
A flash of monotone.
The streets of people again. More shop fronts. Rain. Falling. Colours. A scent of jasmine. Inside Booth’s wardrobe he had eleven sets of identical suits plus the one he was wearing when he was found. The tap in the bathroom dripped and wouldn’t stop. Drip drip drip. Then a break. Then three seconds later it repeated. The monotone of the artwork from Booth’s house.
Security.
“It’s all a key. A conceptual key. The memories are your security.”
Jack opened Booth’s eye. He looked up at Indira and Growden standing over him, watching him with concerned interest. Indira’s lips we
re parted in anticipation.
Indira nodded. She reached in and took the key from Jack’s mind.
“I’ve got it,” she said to Growden, “we can go.”
But, the expression on the crime lord had turned sour. A snarl danced at the edge of his lips.
Jack thought fast. “I need to show you. Get me a datapad.”
Indira moved to get one, but Growden grabbed her arm. “Is he lying?”
She hesitated. Jack could feel her probing. Desperately, he improvised a new block. He thought of the pain in his arm, the searing fire from his eye socket, the anger he felt like a steel fist squeezing his heart. It should be enough.
Indira shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Growden released his grip.
“Straps. You’ll need to undo them,” Jack said.
Growden hesitated.
“Quickly, man, before I lose it all.” Jack’s insistence spurned the crime lord to free the ties that surrounded Jack’s body.
“Tell me what we need.”
Acting without thinking, he grabbed the spike stuck in his arm and yanked it out, twisting his grip and thrusting at Growden. The spear dug into the soft tissue of his tormentor’s left eye, protruding like a giant splinter. Growden yelled, and tugged the spear out. But he acted too rashly, the pain blinding him from any sense in that moment. Fluid, and blood spilt down his face. Indira moved to attack Jack, and he felt a blast of anger through his mind.
He needed to act quickly to prevent her retaliation. He pulled himself up off the table and dropped to the floor.
Growden was screaming. “You’re dead!”
And Jack knew that if he could get close to him, Growden would murder him with his bare hands. Indira was trying to help gauge how bad the wound was, but her employer knocked her aside.
Others were coming. Jack sensed people approaching fast. Security.
Then they were in the room. Shouts and raised voices. Panicked over the bloodied scene in the morgue.
“Time to leave,” Indira shouted to Growden, knocking aside the two guards as they charged through the doors.
The guards turned to follow, but Jack tried to get to his feet. One guard recoiled at the sight of him and focused his own gun on Jack. But it didn’t matter anymore. “I think I might need a doctor,” he croaked.
Monday, 27 May 2115
9:10 AM
The curtain swished aside and a slightly worse for wear Burnfield stepped into the cubicle. His hair was ruffled, and his bright eyes were dull like he’d just woken up with a particularly bad hangover. Getting shocked by a stun weapon had that effect on people. It was a credit to his strength that he’d only been unconscious for little over an hour.
Jack’s bed was tilted forward, his hands under the blanket they’d placed over him. Now in a hospital gown, they’d treated him and cleaned him up, but ultimately, he felt destroyed. The doctors had put a dressing over his left eye.
“How you doing?” Burnfield asked. Looking straight for the telepath’s eyes.
“They think my modified socket will be OK. At least Growden knew how to use the eye extraction tool. But this one—” Jack pointed at the eye socket that Growden had attacked in his frenzy. The doctors had scanned the socket, and it wasn’t good news. Growden had done serious damage. The optic nerve had been badly torn and couldn’t be saved with any technology the hospital had available. “Let’s just say, I won’t see out of it anytime soon.”
“What are they going to do with it?”
“Not much they can do. They’ll requisition some Nanosalve for it. Then sew it up. No chance of a viable reconstruction.”
Burnfield frowned. He dragged a chair from the edge of the room and sat down on it. “I’m sorry. We’ll catch him.”
“OsMiTech have offered to fix it up. They’ll put a second remnant system in there if I agree to live on campus.”
“Is that something you want to do?”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve fought for years to keep out of OsMiTech and maintain a normal life. I can’t throw it all in.” Besides, once you lived on site, there was little reason to leave. He wondered how many residents were virtual prisoners in their safe little world. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. At least he wouldn’t have to meet any more people like Frazier Growden on the inside.
But Keeley wouldn’t have wanted it. Without his wife fighting hard to support his independence, he might still be in there. But, she’d also be safe and alive. His independence was the thing that had led to all of this. And now, he was lying back in a hospital bed, wishing he was anywhere else, but wishing also that he was numb.
There was something on Burnfield’s mind. Despite the pain killers, Jack felt the unease from his visitor. Eventually, he built up the courage and asked the question.
“What about Maguire’s eye?”
“What about it?”
“It’s evidence, you can’t keep it.”
The doctors had wanted him to remove it so they could inspect his modified eye socket. Quite what they would do during an examination he had no idea. It’s not like they’d be able to recognise if anything was broken. Besides, Jack didn’t think there was any damage. His vision was fine, and he seemed to have good control over any access to the remnants. They weren’t consuming his waking thoughts. He sensed they were there, waiting to be prodded, but right now they were quiet. And he was glad. He would hold onto this eye until the authorities forced him to take it out.
“It stays put,” he said simply to Burnfield, throwing a look of determination in the detective’s direction.
The detective sighed, perhaps prepared for the rebuttal. “Jack, you’ve got to play by the rules.”
“It stays. It’s the only sight I’ve got and I’m not letting you have it. If OsMiTech can fix up my artificial eye, then you can have it.”
“I could force the issue.”
Jack shook his head. He didn’t want to fight the man. After the ordeal they’d been through, his relationship with Burnfield was the closest thing he’d consider friendship in a long while. “Unless you’re prepared to physically restrain me, and tear this eye from my socket, you’re not having it. Besides, we need what’s in here. Indira took the contextual key from the remnant. If we’re to go after them, we’ll need it too.”
“Go after them? Go after them where?”
“Growden’s trying to access a remnant vault. I think he plans on destroying it.”
“Wait, back up—what the hell’s a contextual key?”
“They’re used sometimes at OsMiTech. A complex telepathic instruction. Devices can be made sensitive to receiving the right thoughts and operate as security devices. But this was something far more complicated. I’ve never seen something so involved. It wasn’t just an idea, it was a jumble of ideas, smells, colours. All of Maguire’s house was used to reinforced this conditioning. It was a core part of whatever they were doing to him. Whatever it’s being used to protect is important. And more so if Growden wants it.”
“You don’t just walk into remnant vaults.”
“I know.”
Burnfield ran his fingers through his hair, letting it linger. “Whatever they took from you gives them access to the Anthology Storage Unit. I’ve been on to OsMiTech but they’re not taking the threat too seriously.”
Remnant vaults were not popular. Much like OsMiTech that funded and administered the organisation, the remnant vaults were a severe reminder that the world had changed. Protest groups were unhappy with the systematic way that every death required the donation of both eyes to Anthology Storage for processing. At first, it was possible to get dispensation on religious grounds, many despaired that they were sending their loved ones on to the next life incomplete. But, as application for exemption increased beyond what Anthology Storage Administration deemed acceptab
le limits, that clause was closed. Anthology Storage Administration now promised that eyes would only be kept for two years as a crime prevention measure. After that time, they would be disposed of in an appropriate group religious service of the donor’s denomination.
Burnfield continued. “I’ll see them. They don’t quite understand the seriousness of the situation.”
“Or maybe they don’t want to admit to it being serious. Did you tell them about the contextual key?”
“Not yet. I thought it best to hold a little something back. I might need that in a negotiation.”
“When are we going?” Jack put his hands by his side and pressed into the mattress, reaching forwards. If he could get more painkillers he was sure he’d be OK.
Burnfield stood. He lifted his chin and looked Jack squarely in his one-remaining eye. “You’re not coming.”
“What!”
“I said, you’re not coming. This is a police matter. We’ll handle it.”
“What are you saying? That now you’ve taken what you need from me, you’re cutting me loose? Is that how it works?” Jack’s chest felt tight; his mouth dry. What the hell was he hearing?
“You’re in no condition to be discharged yet anyway. Stay here and let the doctors take care of you. After that, I strongly suggest you go to OsMiTech and ask for residency. I think it will do you good to be amongst your own kind for a while. Until you’re properly recuperated.”
“After all I’ve done to help you—you’re cutting me loose. What’s the matter?”
A pause.
“I don’t trust you.”
Jack wasn’t expecting the detective to be so forthcoming.
“I had no choice. They took the key. I couldn’t stop them.”
“It’s not just the key, Jack. I don’t know where I stand with you. You’re feeling sorry for yourself. I’d sooner do this alone than go into it with a man whose agenda I can’t understand. And Growden’s shown an interest in you. I don’t know why and I don’t especially care. But it means you’re an unknown quantity. We’ve had our share of those.”
“How long have you been waiting to tell me all this?” Jack couldn’t look at the detective. Is that what it felt like to be betrayed?
The Remnant Vault (Tombs Rising Book 2) Page 14
