Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

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  CONTENTS

  LABRATS

  TO THE ARCHIMEDES

  13 October 2096

  The Armoured Saint Pub, Edinburgh

  It began on the day when Kendrick Gallmon’s heart stopped beating for ever.

  The pain crashed down on him suddenly and he sagged, unable to prevent his legs crumpling at the knees. He looked down at the stained interior curve of a toilet bowl and gripped its cool ceramic sides with shaking hands, his ears full of the sound of his own laboured gasping. He vomited noisily, bright agony rushing through his every nerve ending, like wildfire surging through a tinder-dry forest. He watched his knuckles turn white where they gripped the porcelain, and he wondered if he was going to die.

  And then, mercifully, the pain began to ease off, leaving him gasping and shivering in the chilly cubicle. He could feel his knees turning damp through his thin cotton jeans. His mouth tasted acid and foul.

  Reaching inside his shirt with a couple of fingers, Kendrick touched the bare skin of his chest. It felt cold and smooth, like a marble statue. Next he applied them to his wrist and tried to find a pulse. Finding nothing there, the knowledge sent a chill sweeping through him, so intense that it made his teeth chatter. He moaned in horror, convinced he must have somehow got it wrong.

  But he knew the truth. Something had changed inside him, for ever.

  Kendrick stumbled to his feet, triggering a series of vivid, dizzying flashes behind his eyes: until it passed, he had to lean with one shoulder against the cubicle’s graffiti-stained door. He sucked in air through his nostrils, calming himself steadily.

  As suddenly as it had come, the pain washed away, like some Pacific storm leaving a devastated village in its wake. Random, disassociated thoughts tumbled through his mind like flotsam. He glanced down into the toilet and grimaced, before hitting the flusher.

  Two long months without a seizure, and now this.

  He turned and pushed the cubicle door open. In front of him stood a row of washbasins, under a dirt-streaked mirror mounted on the wall above. The door opened suddenly, admitting loud music mixed with the sound of booze-filled conversation. A man stepped in, letting the door swing shut again, reducing the noise to a low murmur mingled with the muffled thump of bass.

  There was something familiar about the other man’s face; he looked about late forties, with a black beard turning grey. Kendrick noted the bags under his eyes, which were a pale, watery brown, and how he wore a long woollen coat still damp from the snow.

  Those somehow familiar eyes settled on Kendrick, still leaning uncertainly against the cubicle’s door frame.

  Kendrick experienced a brief bout of dizziness, convinced that there was something important he needed to remember.

  “Ken, what the fuck happened to you?”

  Peter? Peter McCowan. How could he have forgotten? His thoughts felt muffled, obscured, as if a veil had been hastily drawn over his memories.

  Kendrick could see his own reflection in the mirror and realized he looked like shit. He stepped past McCowan and ran water into a washbasin. He splashed some across his cheeks, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “Bad seizure,” he replied shakily. He didn’t feel up to elaborating.

  “How bad?”

  “Very bad.” Kendrick coughed. “Don’t use that name,” he added.

  “So, what name should I be using?”

  “Never my real name, for a start.” He leant over and sluiced a jet of water around his tongue, trying to get rid of the lingering taste of acid. He spat the water back into the sink and pulled himself upright, again catching sight of himself in the mirror.

  Short-cropped head, narrow face: the same gaunt, fleshless aspect of so many Labrats. Still, he had coped a lot better than most of them, given that most of the Labrats were dead.

  In the mirror he could see McCowan behind him, gently shaking his head. “Malky’s still out there in the bar, wondering what’s happened to you.”

  “I’ll get back to him.” Kendrick noticed that his hands still shook slightly. Perhaps that was only nerves and not, as he suspected, indicative of augment-related nerve damage. “It’s just something I have to be prepared to deal with,” he added over his shoulder.

  He glanced up again at McCowan’s reflection in the mirror. What is it that feels so wrong here? The longer he paused, the more he was filled with a tremendous sense of unease.

  Kendrick closed his eyes against a fresh twinge of nausea. He should just make his excuses, go home, sort something out with Malky another time.

  “I’ll be frank, you look in bad shape. I don’t think Hardenbrooke’s treatments have been doing you any good.”

  Kendrick turned slowly, studying the other man’s face. Bright coruscations slid across Kendrick’s line of vision, followed by another wash of dislocation. With it a snatch of knowledge: a memory suddenly revealed, as if it had been temporarily locked away in some dark closet of his mind, only now returning with all the subtlety and grace of a drunken punch.

  As he almost lost his balance, McCowan stepped forward as if to help. Kendrick backed up against the washbasin and put out a warning hand that stopped him.

  “I’ll take it you’re not okay,” said McCowan.

  “Something’s happening to me.” It was starting – he was losing his mind at last. Any notion of finding a cure for what was inside him suddenly seemed far-fetched, laughable. How could he have fooled himself for so long?

  “You’re going to have to tell me what’s wrong,” the other man insisted.

  Dead man, dead man – the words kept spinning through Kendrick’s mind like a mantra.

  Peter McCowan, staring up with vacant eyes at the dark ceiling of a lightless storage area, as if that gaze could penetrate the many levels of the Maze to see the sun beyond . . .

  McCowan had moved further away from the door leading back into the bar area. Kendrick lurched past him and gripped the handle, began turning it.

  The familiar sound of the bar beyond increased slightly. He paused with the door fractionally open.

  “You’re not here,” he murmured, turning to see if the dead man was still there. McCowan still gazed back at him with calm eyes.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  McCowan cocked his head. “What for?”

  “For letting you die.”

  The other shook his head. “They were never going to let both of us out of there – you know that for a fact. We both knew your family might still be alive out there somewhere. But there was no one who needed me, so I looked like the obvious choice.”

  This was too much. Over the years he’d imagined what it would be like, to be able
to talk to Peter one last time, to find a way to understand what had happened between them. Now it appeared that he had the opportunity, and suddenly he didn’t want it. He wasn’t ready for it.

  It came to Kendrick that he must be caught up in some particularly vivid form of hallucination generated by his augmentations: fantasies that imposed themselves on the real world. How much longer did he have left, then, before he could no longer distinguish the imagined from the real? Was this what it was like for other Labrats when they got close to the end, when their augs consumed first their nervous systems and then their bodies, from the inside out? Did they imagine their pasts literally coming back to haunt them?

  If that was the case, then perhaps he would be better off dead.

  “I’m here to tell you something. I need to go soon, so are you listening to me?”

  Kendrick stared down at the door handle. Sanity lay on the other side of it. “All right, I’m listening.”

  “Don’t trust Hardenbrooke. He’s a dangerous bastard. Do you hear me? He’s dangerous.”

  Kendrick pulled the door open. Before he could step through, he sensed the ghost of Peter McCowan coming up close behind him. He saw its shadow darken the inside panel of the door, and felt as if his blood was about to freeze over.

  “One last thing before you go.” Kendrick could even feel the ghost’s warm, beery breath on the back of his neck. “So that you know I’m here to help you. The leather suitcase sitting near the front of the bar – look inside it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Near the entrance.”

  The shadow shifted, and Kendrick imagined a pallid hand reaching out to pull him back. He stepped through quickly and slammed the door shut behind him, loud enough to attract one or two stares from some of the Saint’s other clientele. He ignored them, turning back to the door he had just stepped through. He reached out and gently pushed it open again.

  Nobody was there.

  But there never had been, had there? He was sure of that.

  The Armoured Saint pub was long and narrow, with wide windows facing out onto the street at one end and a bar extending from near the entrance all the way to the dark alcoves in the rear. Kendrick now turned left, towards the front section.

  Between the bar itself and the tall windows looking out over the street, Kendrick could see a raised area of floor with a few tables and chairs on it. Business was quiet this early in the evening so it was currently deserted. A leather suitcase rested on the floor by a table next to the windows. A half-finished drink stood on the table as if someone had left in enough of a hurry to forget about their luggage.

  This is crazy. Suffering an unpleasant delusion was bad enough, but paying this much attention to it was a step beyond. Kendrick turned away from both the table and the suitcase and found his way back to Malky, who was at the very rear of the bar. The air there was hot and thick with the stench of smoke and booze, in pleasant contrast to the bitter cold outside.

  He found Malky staring vaguely into space, his arms folded over his stomach so that his checked shirt was rucked up over his pale rotund belly, exposing the elaborate design on his cowboy belt buckle. This buckle was something that Malky treasured and one of the bioware dealer’s favourite stories revolved around his first and last visit to Los Angeles, only days before that city abruptly ceased to exist. Small and round, with his thinning blond hair brushed into an untidy side-parting, Malky was hardly the image of a frontiersman.

  He raised his eyebrows as Kendrick sat down beside him. Malky smiled. “Well, I was beginning to think you’d gone home.”

  “Please, Malky, I feel bad. Really bad.” He’d surely only imagined that his heart had stopped beating. A ridiculous notion: if it had, he’d be dead. He subconsciously reached up again and touched fingers delicately to his chest. Malky again raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Kendrick shook his head.

  “Don’t ask.” He ducked his head a little, resting his elbows on the table top, briefly massaging his temples with his fingertips. He glanced back up at Malky and managed a faint grin. “I think I’m starting to hallucinate.”

  Malky sat up a little straighter, and Kendrick was pleased to see a look of genuine concern sweep over the little man’s face. “What happened? Have you had another seizure?”

  “Yeah – now I’m seeing ghosts.” Kendrick leaned his head back against the nicotine-stained wallpaper and shrugged amiably, as if to say that it really wasn’t any big deal.

  Malky looked even more alarmed. “You need to see Hardenbrooke now. This is serious.”

  “It’s not like I’m in the final stages or anything,” he replied. “Look.” Kendrick pulled down the collar of his T-shirt and leaned closer, eyeing the people around them. But nobody was looking.

  The lines and ridges marking the flesh over his ribcage were visible, but only barely. There was no sign of the overwhelming striation that indicated a Labrat in the final, terminal stages of rogue augmentation growth. “Okay? So take it easy.”

  Malky glared at him, while Kendrick let his own gaze pass over the bar’s other inhabitants. Most of the accents around them were, unsurprisingly, American. When he’d first come here to Scotland it had been easier to keep track of faces, but in recent years that had become impossible, as even more refugees escaped from the US and its civil war.

  “What do you mean, ‘seeing ghosts’?”

  “Just what I said.” Kendrick remembered his malt whisky and picked it up. He fingered the thimble-sized glass, wishing he could find a more satisfactory way to numb the memories that the ghost – no, he reminded himself, the hallucination – had dredged up.

  Malky shook his head. “I’m telling you, we shouldn’t just be sitting around talking like this. You need medical treatment.” He reached out and touched Kendrick’s hand as he lifted the whisky to his mouth. “And no more of that stuff might not be a bad idea while we’re at it.”

  “I still need those papers,” muttered Kendrick. “That’s why I’m here.”

  The “papers” in question would give him the identity of a lawyer who had died in the LA firestorm and so was therefore not in a position to complain about this misappropriation of his life.

  “Don’t worry, that’s all sorted out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, really.” Malky shot him a pitying look.

  Kendrick drained the last of his whisky, a comfortable heat settling in the pit of his stomach. “Look, I’m seeing Hardenbrooke tomorrow anyway, so it’s not going to make any difference if I see him now or then.”

  “Fine, I admit defeat. So . . . whose ghost did you see?”

  Kendrick made an exasperated noise. “Malky, I didn’t see anything. I imagined I saw something.” He could feel the alcohol softening the edge of his thoughts. Nonetheless, he realized that he was on the verge of a serious panic attack. Perhaps talking about his recent experience would objectify it, help put it outside himself.

  “I imagined I was talking to someone who died back in the Maze. When I turned around, there he was, like I’m speaking to you now.” Kendrick winced. “Trouble is, it felt real enough.”

  Malky put a hand to his mouth as if appropriately appalled. “Fuck, I’m sorry. That can’t have been easy.”

  “It was a long time ago,” replied Kendrick, echoing the ghost’s own words.

  Delusions, seizures . . . what else could they be but the precursor to a long-drawn-out death for him?

  As he closed his eyes, the hubbub of the bar became abruptly muted, distant. In this artificial hush he searched for the sound of his own heartbeat.

  He could hear nothing.

  Yet, on opening his eyes again, here he was, still breathing, thinking, patently alive. Another hallucination, then; imagining that he was dead, hollow, silent on the inside.

  Barely a moment had passed, and the world flooded back in on him. Delusion or not, Malky was right: he should go and see Hardenbrooke immediately.

  So why didn’t he? Why
would he trust the word of a dead man, a phantom?

  He suddenly remembered the suitcase sitting unattended at the far end of the bar.

  “. . . Won’t say anything more about it, then,” Malky was saying as Kendrick stood up. Malky looked up at him with a perplexed expression. “Where are you off to now?”

  “I’ll just be a second.” This is stupid, thought Kendrick. Even so, he hurried to the far end of the bar, making a casual study of the people around him. Faces he’d seen a hundred times before but had never spoken to.

  The unfinished drink was still sitting on the table. The suitcase still sat next to it on the floor. It couldn’t have been there for long before he located it, or Lucia or one of the other bar staff would have noticed it by now.

  Kendrick sat down on a seat nearby and glanced around him. What if the owner of the suitcase came back and found him poking through its contents?

  The suitcase looked expensive, its leather soft and creamy, the silver clasp glowing brightly under the overhead lights. Feeling like a thief, he leaned down and opened it.

  Kendrick found himself gazing down into a jumble of wires and electronic paraphernalia, all bunched around several lumps of putty-like explosive. That this might itself be part of some extended hallucinatory episode crossed his mind.

  The best thing to do was to see what someone else thought they saw. He stood up and stepped over to the bar.

  “Lucia.”

  She glanced over at Kendrick from behind the bar with a nodded greeting. Then she frowned, as if noticing something in his expression. She finished serving her customer, then stepped out from behind the bar. Lucia was tall, imposing; in a previous life she’d been a military engineer, adrift in Cuba with the UN peacekeeper forces there while the unrest back in the US spiralled into civil war. After that some chain of circumstance had brought her here, to the Armoured Saint. Apart from her work as the bar manager she helped Todd take care of any security requirements on behalf of the Saint’s owner – who, it so happened, was Malky.

  She looked down at Kendrick. “What’s up?” she asked, in a voice deep enough to be baritone.