by Curtis Hox
They must have gleaned the truth after scrubbing his mind: the Wellborn Maker Lord could give the Protocols as a gift, if he chose to.
“No,” he said.
He heard the cydrones before he saw them. Each one had moved closer. One stood in the kitchen, another down the hall Skippard had used to enter the den. He could sense the two others outside beyond the walls. If they were planning to douse and reduce him, he would blow this house to bits, and them with it. They had no idea what he could do.
If all else fails, I’ll summon ...
“You thought I’d just hand them over to my long-lost son?” Skippard asked Cliff.
Cliff nodded. “I do. Because if you don’t ... I’ll take you in.”
Skippard understood what that meant. Erasure. “You can try.”
Gramgadon stood, as if he expected a sudden gale might blow the roof off.
Cliff raised a calming hand. “You don’t think I’d make the challenge without some assurance I’d be able to handle you, do you?”
Skippard wondered if he’d underestimated his old family friend. Cliff was a little man with a little man’s ambition, but he had always been clever.
“I would expect you to do just that.”
Cliff snapped his fingers. Another cydrone appeared out of the kitchen. This one was crimson with silver lines. He hadn’t seen it before. It was branded with Consortium symbols. This was an official Ghost Hunter, and it was live and dangerous, and staring right at him.
“Meet Iku,” Cliff said. “I’ve been modifying Iku for the past several years.” He walked to it, like a loving father or pet owner. “On my first day at Sterling, I left it to watch over the Alters, and the students thought they’d play a nice joke. Your daughter slaved it.”
That was simple, but dangerous for her. Skippard assessed the scenarios, wondering how long she’d been inside. Could Cliff have perfected a rapid capture program?
“She wasn’t in long,” Cliff said. “But my team has done well with these things.”
Joss stood up. “She had it standing on one leg, reading a book, even.”
“That was funny,” Cliff said. “And so is this.”
* * *
Simone popped out of the circuit in a place beneath the stairs where she could squat. She heard her father’s voice. He sounded in control, and when the brother she’d never known appeared, she bit her bottom lip so that she didn’t say something. She wanted to jump through the wall to see him.
Simone felt an indescribable pull as if she were sliding down a slippery surface with no purchase. She willed herself not to move, but she began edging toward the wall. She put her hands out to stop herself, but she kept moving. Sparks flew. She shut her eyes and used every ounce of will power.
She emerged into the living room behind her father. She saw him turn as she accelerated toward ... Iku.
Before she could think another thought, she was slaved inside it, like she had been in the library. She relaxed, even though the constant contact with its interior energized her. However, she was no longer under any strain. She sensed the onboard AI system go silent.
She stared at her brother through Iku’s visual system. Like in the pictures she’d seen, before her mother took them all down, he was good-looking, delicate even—much more like their mother than their father—but he was strong and stout enough to fit well into his armor.
“Hey,” she said. But the drone didn’t speak.
What the ...?
“Simone,” her father said, “don’t freak out.”
“Hello,” she said, her voice tiny and hampered, as if she spoke into a metal bucket over her head. “Can you hear me?”
“Just barely. I’m betting you’re stuck in there.”
“What?”
“Can you get out?”
“Like last time?”
Joss, still standing, and no longer looking as if he might be able to help, said, “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Simone asked.
Joss said to Agent Nable. “It’s one big ghost magnet now, isn’t it?”
Agent Nable nodded. “Thanks to Skippard Wellborn’s project to find an embodied home for wayward ghosts.”
“A misdirected project, if I might say so myself,” Skippard announced.
“Dad?”
“You’re stuck, Simone. Relax.”
“Not only stuck,” Agent Nable said, “but she can’t summon in there.”
“No, she can’t,” her father agreed.
Simone watched her father’s face fall. He looked like he was digesting something painful, or maybe trying to solve a riddle. She tried to push herself outward like she had last time. She might as well have been a regular embodied person willing herself to float across a room. Something so easy—that she now took for granted—was as impossible as being weighted down with a thousand-pound shackle on each ankle.
She mumbled her mantra, but her voice didn’t project.
“Won’t be having that, either,” Agent Nable said.
“Hey!” Simone yelled, but no one heard her.
She tried to move again, but she had no control. All she could do was see and hear. The drone was nothing more than a tomb. Its cold interior dulled the digital sparks. Those were no longer visible to anyone on the outside, and to her, they were almost imperceptible. Soon, the sparks would be gone and she would stand there in stasis. She wondered how long she could stay inside.
It was peaceful, if standing in a silent space no larger than your body could be called peaceful. If she shut her eyes she didn’t feel constrained at all. Just gone! She snapped her eyes back opened. “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”
But no one heard now.
Her father turned to Cliff. “Are you planning on keeping her in there?”
“I am.”
He turned toward her. “Simone, remember how I told you could enter a sleep-like trance for a week if you wanted to?” She tried to nod. Her father had dropped numerous hints about how special it was to be disembodied. He’d once said that she could rest, if she chose, and awaken with such clarity of mind as if every cell of her body had been remade. “Try to dream now … until I come back for you.”
He winked at her.
Her father expanded. A bright light erupted, and the sound of a hurricane filled the house. She saw the room spin. Iku was flying backward. It careened into a wall with a thud, its head smashing through the drywall.
She didn’t feel any pain, of course, and the disorientation of being askew didn’t bother her. When the house fell down around her, she relaxed as if she were in a protective shell in the middle of a storm.
She sighed, shut her eyes, and tried to calm herself into a deep trance-like state, as if asleep.
* * *
Skippard had practiced this many times out in the woods in abandoned sub-divisions built before the Rupture. It didn’t take much for him to channel enough energy out of the air to knock down walls. Right now, he was angry, which (for some reason he couldn’t tell) always gave it that little extra push.
When he saw Cliff fly through a window, he hoped the guy’s skull shattered on the rocks and every bit of his brain splattered in the dirt. He was also happy to see the cybernetic drones’ capture-net break as they tumbled away. They obviously hadn’t been prepared for this potential attack. They also didn’t know he could bring down the house.
He shielded the boy, Joss, by lifting the couch before a ceiling joists slammed into the ground. Gramgadon curled up underneath with him.
Jonen flew away on his own. Simone’s drone was covered in rubble that would take hours to clear.
That’s all he needed.
Skippard shot into the air with one place in mind.
EIGHT
AGENT YANCEY WELLBORN LAY ON A SOFA in her bungalow, listening to angry wind howling through the trees.
Since returning to Sterling, she’d struggled to accept the bad luck of Gramgadon kidnapping Joss Beckwith, a student who’d been Rogue-branded just a few weeks ago.
He was at risk, and would always be at risk; they knew who he was, and they never forgot. But the odds of them stumbling up on him ...
Yancey stretched, as best she could all wrapped up in the Rejuv bandages. She fiddled with a tattered piece at her wrist. She had pushed aside the medical gloves to examine the pallid skin on the back of her hands. It was soft, and white, and healed since they’d wrapped her up in nano medicine. She smoothed out the pieces on her belly and tried to forget she had to wear these for (at least) another month. They itched. She imagined they stank, although they didn’t, and they looked horrible. Worse, the weakness she had to hide all day long annoyed her.
“A precaution,” her Consortium doctor had told her. “So keep them on.”
The Nanovamp Wraith that had sunk its teeth into her, uploading her encoded genoscript essence, had also infected her with a billion cellular RAI imprimaturs. These were pasted, like viruses, within every cell of her body. The bandages were removing these micro brands attempting to hijack her RNA cells, little messengers that orchestrated what proteins did in the body. It wasn’t just a matter of erasing graffiti, no; the Rogues used this intrusive method of imprimatur ownership as a way to sneak droning mechanisms in.
If the therapy didn’t clean her up, she could begin to turn into a sympathizer, later a full-fledged slave, ending in a ... vessel of filth.
Rogueslave.
Yancey removed her shades and rubbed her eyes hard enough to feel the retinal lenses that connected her to Cyberspace. She had looked at herself in the mirror recently. Her face was drawn and tired, as if she’d been running marathons for the past month, day after day, without rest. Her beauty was compromised, what little she had, in comparison with the enhanced women you saw everywhere these days.
Yancey grabbed a cold glass of water and took a sip. She wondered how much longer she would have to suffer the troubles of a physical body. Her husband had promised her that she would be next to be ghosted. The incursion and the attack on her daughter complicated things, and little Simone was now a ghost.
Her Consortium sidearm lay in its holster on an end table. She snatched it out. She stared at the two-tone semi-automatic Sig, its clip loaded, one in the chamber. Safety on, of course.
She caressed her sidearm as she considered the fact Skippard had prepared his family for ghosting years ago. Yancey had happily provided her GDNA, and he’d taken it into his lab, and did what he did. He’d done the same thing with each of their children. Poor Jonen had suffered the Real Death, but he could have been rejuved or even ghosted. She bit back a cry, those tears long gone.
The anger, though, was still there; she had learned to live with it, like you would a missing hand or foot.
“How?” Yancey once asked. “How does ghosting happen?”
Skippard had stammered a few nonsensical words as they’d driven down the road. He’d even pretended to be concerned something was wrong with their retro stick shift, combustion-engine sports car.
“It begins with processing the genoscript of a person,” he said, “so that it can be rendered in Cyberspace. By law, that can only happen if said person has already died, but if the genoscript processing happens to a living person whose name resides in my master list and that person dies after the process has started ...”
“What?” she asked. “Dies after the process?”
“It’s complex. Quantum computer stuff. Our cyber-systems work if the current ontological state of being for a person is alive or dead. It’s all about what the techno-mystics call capturing the phenomenological subject. If the process begins on a live person, and his or her name is on my Protocols’ list, which is nothing more than a rendering list, then we get a ghost … if that person dies during the processing. I could do it to myself, right now, if I, say, called the Consortium techs to start the process, waited a few minutes, then shot myself in the head. It’s reliable. I’ve done it several times, you know.”
He spent the next hour backpedaling, talking about the problems with ghosting, and how it was a complex and dangerous epiphenomenon that no one but he understood. The creation of a Digi-Ghost was an unexpected after-effect of blending his work in general intelligence quantum computing with nanotech to save human personalities for rehusking.
“Promise me you won’t do it,” he demanded.
She’d promised, but now she was regretting all the years she’d kept it.
Yancey had gone to a Rejuv Facility a few weeks ago, before the problems at Sterling started and she’d been infected, and had done a full upload. They’d induced a coma, and she’d been under for the three days it took for the capture. She’d lain there while they scanned every bit of her genoscript, down to the messy quantum levels, where the real person lay. Her genoscript was now ready for her, if she were to die.
Sitting on the couch, staring at her sidearm, she considered the mind-boggling fact that if she sent an anonymous message saying she’d been killed, the Consortium would begin processing her script while they verified her death. The first twenty-four hours were critical. They’d wait for her body to be taken to a facility, where her brain would be assessed as perished but viable. They’d take her genoscript and encode it with a new body during a husking process of rapid cell development. This was all according to procedure and had worked numerous times for the rich and powerful. For them, death was not an issue. The ceiling for a single body’s viability was almost two hundred years, while a person’s essence could last forever to be rehusked again, and again, and again.
Make an anonymous call that Agent Yancey Wellborn has been killed ...
She’d actually still be alive, of course, and since her name was written in the prized Protocols, the Consortium would begin the process, no questions asked ... she could piddle around, maybe go use the bathroom, which took about ten minutes these days. All she would have to do is shoot herself through the roof of her mouth. No one would even hear. She had seen the gory results of several gun-shot suicides. She understood the procedure. Her body would die. Inexplicably, she would appear as a ghosted version of herself somewhere within ten yards of her body. However, she’d appear as a copy of her current, damaged self.
Something about the risky, almost gambling nature of it all made her wary. Of course, in case the ghosting didn’t work, she would also send a message (to Rigon) so that they could retrieve her body and get her to the clinic. The Rejuv technicians needed her cerebral cortex to make the husking work, if she were to be given a new body, and they needed it fast.
Skippard was silent on why this celerity was necessary. Somehow the double rendered in Cyberspace was linked to whatever existed in a person’s skull. Some people called it a soul, others the mind, some the self. The new word was essence, a term that had been popular thousands of years ago, but discarded. Philosophers now debated these age-old arguments as if they were as vital as oxygen. When Simone was being bitten by the Vamps, the RAIs were using their immense cyber-power to capture her essence. Simone was being uploaded at a rapid pace, and so Yancey had killed her daughter to save her.
That was the only way she’d known to do it.
Call the facility, shoot myself, and have my metaverse send a message to Rigon. If all goes well, he arrives and finds me as a ghost. The Consortium will shut down the husking process. I won’t be given a new body. I’ll be classified as an Unperson. They’ll know I’ve been ghosted and come after me, sure. But we Wellborns are adept at avoiding capture. Call the Consortium, send a message to Rigon to come here (he’s in a bungalow not far away), wait a few minutes for the process to begin, shoot myself in the head. That’s it. Shoot myself in the head ... that’s it.
She set the gun down and picked up her tablet. Once she made the call, she would have to follow through. The Consortium had strict rules. If they learned she had faked her death, she would lose the valuable privilege of being husked in the future.
She triggered the security on her tablet with a few quick keystrokes and opened her mouth to fast-dial the Consortium Re
juv Facility when she saw movement in the kitchen.
Skippard appeared.
He walked into the room. He saw the gun out of its holster. “What are you doing?”
“I’m tired of waiting, Skippard.” She raised her arms so that he could see the bandages. “I’m tired of this.”
He sat on the couch, not a single spark showed.
She nodded with admiration at his ability to imitate normal human movement. “Impressive.”
“Yance, not yet. Things are ... complicated with Simone being a ghost. I’m so close to putting a lid on all this. Besides, you promised.”
“I don’t care if I have an evil double. You’ve always outwitted yours. I can, as well.” He shook his head. She could see some concern there, but it was something else. “What is it?”
“We don’t have time for this ... not now.”
“Simone?” Yancey dropped her tablet.
“She’s all right. But I need you to call in the cavalry.”
Yancey stood. “What happened, Skippard? Goddammit, what did you get her into now?”
“Nothing ... well, we just followed them.”
“What?”
“We went to Gramgadon’s place.”
Yancey retrieved her pistol and holstered it. She carried it because she was supposed to. She’d never had to fire it once. Her preferable go-to techniques made small-arms gunfire look like pillow fighting. She finished strapping on her holster. “I can’t believe you took her there. That’s a hothouse of Rogue activity.”
She grabbed her shades to access her metaverse. She saw there was something else. “What?”
“Cliff betrayed us.” Skippard stood. “He’s slaved her to a drone.”
If she could she would beat on Skippard’s chest, as hard as possible. “You once told me, ‘Imagine being stuck in a clock on the wall for a century or longer. That could happen, Yance. It really could.’ That’s what you told me, Skippard. That’s what you told me.”
