Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Or perhaps someone else had picked up and listened at the other end. And then that same someone had carefully hung up again. Kendrick thought of the suitcase bomb, he thought of what Whitsett had already told him, and then he let himself in the main door.

  To his surprise, Caroline hadn’t changed the cryptkey that was still stored in his wand; nor had she removed his biometric details from the building’s database. He gained access to her flat without a problem.

  “Hello?” Kendrick stuck his head around Caroline’s kitchen door, his mind full of half-convincing explanations for why he’d just barged in. But nobody was there.

  Maybe she’s off somewhere else, he thought. She could have taken her wand anywhere with her. She might not even be in the country. Somehow, he suspected otherwise.

  Nobody was in the living room, either, and her study was empty. He put his hand on the door leading into her bedroom, then turned to look at the workstation.

  It took a full two seconds for the machine to boot up, then Kendrick navigated his way to Caroline’s work directory, soon locating a file named “Archimedes”. He routed the same file through to the windowscreen, and what he saw displayed there was recognizably the same scene he had seen displayed across the front entrance of a hotel the day before.

  But what did it mean, if anything? That Caroline had been suffering the same hallucinations, the same seizures? If so, why hadn’t she told him about them?

  He studied the ’screen, wondering if he would catch a glimpse of a boy with butterfly wings if he waited long enough.

  Next, he pulled up the TransAfrica sequence, watching as that corporate logo rushed towards him out of darkness again.

  The list of interactive options was impressive. You could dive deep into the Straits, for instance, drill virtual holes into the subaquatic structure of the TransAfrica Bridge, and bring up an enormous mass of engineering, environmental and geological data; or call up projections for the effect of the construction on the economies of neighbouring countries, or even on their flora and fauna. Using his wand to control the simulation, Kendrick brought his point of view swooping down until it hovered inches above the surface of the bridge itself, so real that he could almost feel warm southern winds full of Moroccan sand harrying the waves far below.

  The simulation guided him, again, towards the Archimedes. He let the software sweep him around the simulated circumference of the station. Its great metal walls rushed in towards him, and then—

  And then he was inside it.

  It was all terrifyingly familiar.

  Kendrick let his POV drift forward until it was near the centre of one of the cylinder’s two main chambers. Then he set it to a slow rotation. Grass rippled far below – or perhaps above – and, watching the windowscreen, he felt a strange tug in the area of his stilled heart.

  Far down the length of the station he saw a dense cluster, like a swarm of locusts, hovering in the air. Then they were moving, uncountable minute dots growing denser one moment, thinning out the next, but moving gradually closer. The nearest ones resolved into tiny, familiar shapes with gossamer wings.

  Kendrick reached out with his wand to shut the simulation down, his mouth suddenly dry. It came to him that if his heart were still capable of beating, it would be rattling like a drill in its cage of ribs.

  This was the point at which he became aware he was not, in fact, alone.

  “Caroline?”

  He stood up. Something had moved in the bedroom, making a sound. He swore at himself, several possible explanations for his presence here competing for his attention all at once. Stupid, stupid bastard, he thought. He hadn’t even looked in there properly.

  He put his hand against the bedroom door and pushed gently. Caroline stood at the far end of the room, naked, staring out over the rooftops. She didn’t react or even turn round as he entered. Something was very wrong.

  “Caroline, are you all right? What are you . . .?”

  Kendrick’s voice trailed off then. No reaction, no sign that she was even aware of his presence.

  He stepped up to her, reaching out a hesitant hand to her shoulder. He moved around to her side, and was shocked at what he saw. Her augments had turned rogue: thick ropes of augment-growth lay under her skin, wrapping themselves around her spine and ribcage. They hadn’t yet spread up past her neck, which explained how she’d managed to keep her condition hidden from him.

  Kendrick wondered if she had become catatonic, which happened when the augments interfered too much with the central nervous system, effectively reducing the mind to a prisoner in a bony cell.

  Caroline’s expression remained vacant and he noticed that she appeared to be gazing upwards, past the rooftops and into the sky. He touched her chin, carefully turning her face towards him. He wanted to lead her away from the window, get her back into some clothes – anything.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Kendrick noticed Caroline’s own wand sitting on a table by the bed. So it must have been her who had picked up on the line when he’d called.

  And then, finally, her stare locked on to his. He felt a seizure rushing on him like an express train.

  A white-hot comet exploded inside Kendrick’s head, and Caroline’s face reeled away from him as he tumbled to the floor, her expressionless gaze shifting fractionally to follow his descent. He screamed as pain rippled like fire through every part of his being. As he screamed again, his tongue burned like molten lead.

  Kendrick prayed for death, for a cessation of such terrible, overwhelming pain. He lay at her feet and his back arched and twisted as he writhed on the carpet, desperate to escape his own body.

  It was the boy with the butterfly wings again.

  Kendrick could see his face more clearly now, and wondered what it was about it that looked so familiar. The wings were beautiful and diaphanous, two or three times larger than the diminutive torso from which they grew. The eyes were tiny azure things like gems glittering in that curiously blank face.

  The idea that he somehow knew who the boy was haunted Kendrick. I could swear I’m really in this place, he thought. For the bedroom was gone, and all around him the walls of the world curved up to meet each other. Shimmering shapes of bright energy flickered across the landscape, and a sound came to Kendrick’s ears, barely audible, as if a million-strong choir was humming quietly to itself, somewhere very far away.

  He strained to listen, remembering the background sound he had heard when he’d called Caroline from the market earlier: like listening to the whole world having a conversation at once. But instead of cacophony everyone could understand everything that was being said. A perfect meeting of minds . . .

  And then the Archimedes was gone as abruptly as it had appeared, and Kendrick found himself back in the real world. The pain vanished as if it had never been.

  “Well, sunshine, fancy meeting you here.”

  Kendrick blinked, hauled himself up, and found himself kneeling in a pool of his own sweat and vomit. Peter McCowan crouched next to him, hands clasped on his knees, grinning down.

  Kendrick looked around wildly, then saw Caroline slumped on the floor beneath the window.

  “Peter, what the—? Oh, Christ.” He rolled over onto his hands and knees, pulling himself upright. As he leant over Caroline, he saw that she was still breathing.

  “I was just dropping by.”

  “You’re not even here. I’m going fucking crazy.”

  “Aye, well, there’s the thanks you get,” Peter sighed, pulling himself upright and wandering out of the bedroom.

  The grey skies outside had been replaced by the beginnings of a bright afternoon. The sun shone down wanly on the landscape of the city. Kendrick wondered how long he’d been lying unconscious on the floor, and decided that he didn’t want to know.

  Now he lifted Caroline up by the arms and manhandled her into her bed. Her head lolling, she made a guttural grunting sound, her eyes rolling wildly under their lids. As he pulled the duvet over her she twisted into it
. She mumbled something incomprehensible, but as far as he could tell she was out of the bizarre fugue state that he’d found her in. Now she appeared to be sleeping naturally.

  Kendrick shook his head numbly, and followed after McCowan. He found him in the kitchen.

  “Two sugars, right?” Peter banged cupboard doors open and shut until he found the tin marked Sugar. Kendrick watched as the ghost poured hot water into two mugs before sinking into one of the chairs by the kitchen table. The ghost reached for an open carton of milk and dribbled it into each of the mugs, spilling almost as much on the table.

  McCowan pushed one across the table towards Kendrick, slopping even more tea out of the mug. The hot liquid began to soak into a small pile of paper magazines and an eepsheet. Kendrick sat down opposite, gingerly sliding the magazines and ’sheet away from the growing pool.

  Then he stopped and stared at the two mugs. Ghosts just didn’t make cups of tea. If he picked up his own tea, that would make the thing sitting across the table from him objectively real. He made no move to pick up the mug.

  Kendrick licked his lips. “Who are you?”

  “Peter McCowan. Probably.” Kendrick started to say something, but the other man held his hands out in a stop gesture. “I’ll qualify that. I’m Peter McCowan. I am also, to a lesser extent, you, and also Caroline, and anyone else I ever knew who was also involved in Ward Seventeen back in the Maze. So, to rephrase things, I’m Peter McCowan – but that’s not necessarily the same thing as the Peter McCowan.”

  Kendrick remembered the Peter McCowan he’d known: a charming rogue whose apparent ability to talk his way out of almost any bad situation had deserted him the day he arrived at the Maze.

  Kendrick shook his head. “I keep thinking that Caroline is going to walk in here and see me talking to a blank wall. I thought you were some kind of hallucination, but I’m not sure anyone can have this kind of conversation with a hallucination. In which case, I don’t know what you are.”

  “It’s a good question. Let’s just say the augment technology they put in me in the Maze had the unexpected side-benefit of preserving the memories and thoughts from a dead mind. As to why it should do so, well, it constitutes a self-evolving cybernetic organism in its own right. Maybe preserving such things increases its ability to survive. Maybe Draeger intended that. Or maybe I’m just a cooperative community of nanites, several tens of thousands of generations beyond the ones that first inhabited my body, which only thinks it’s me. Either way, my advice to you remains the same. Don’t go back to Hardenbrooke.”

  Kendrick’s lips felt heavy and numb. To his surprise, he began to feel anger. Just then, just for an instant, he hated McCowan in a way he couldn’t previously have imagined. Here was a literal ghost from his past, demanding his attention, his active participation in schemes born of madness.

  “Do you know what the alternative is?” Kendrick asked. “How could you be Peter and have been there in the Maze, and yet not know what happens to people like us when our augments turn rogue and we leave them untreated?”

  “Kendrick—”

  “You know what I heard happens in those secure wards that the Legislate operate? They open you up and try and cut the things directly out of you. But they can never get all of them, so they start to grow back again. Yet they still do it anyway.”

  Kendrick shook his head. “And sometimes when the augmentations grow back in, they develop in new and even more unexpected ways.” He stared at the ghost with fervent eyes. “I need Hardenbrooke. With his help I can stay free, and maybe then find a way not just to stay alive but to stay at least remotely human for as long as I can before these fucking things inside me finally kill me!”

  He was hyperventilating, dizzy with the effort of coping with this so soon after his latest seizure, furious but feeling desperately frail.

  “Kendrick. This is why . . .” Peter’s shape twisted, disappeared, reappeared again, his features marginally distorted. “. . . rdenbrooke has set you up. I swear this is true. The nanotech tracers he’s put in you do more than restructure the core algorithms of your augmentations. They act like a Trojan horse, analysing you from the inside out, practically reading your fucking thoughts. Remember what happened in the Maze, Kendrick. Remember the four of us – you, me, Buddy and Robert.”

  “I remember.”

  “What’s inside you is based on Max Draeger’s research. He . . . he . . .”

  As Kendrick watched, McCowan became more like a two-dimensional image, or a badly tuned signal. “Listen, Kendrick, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you soon. For Christ’s sake, think about what I’m saying.” He flickered again, his voice turning scratchy, giving the lie to any notion of his being a genuine physical manifestation.

  A product of technology, then, not a ghost – or at any rate not the kind that haunted empty houses and lonely castles. McCowan’s image flickered once more, then finally disappeared. Kendrick felt a touch of vertigo as he realized that the tea, the spreading puddle of it, had vanished. The table was bare of any sign of Peter McCowan’s presence.

  For a few minutes, Kendrick stared at the empty seat in front of him, filled with an overwhelming sensation of unreality.

  16 October 2096

  Uisghe Beatha bar, Leith

  “Vasilevich?”

  Hardenbrooke’s face still stung from the freezing rain blowing off the sea. The bar was tucked away in an obscure side road not far from the docks at Leith. Malky glanced up in response, and Hardenbrooke thought the little man couldn’t have looked more furtive if he’d tried.

  “There are other people here,” Hardenbrooke stated flatly.

  Malky made an exaggerated show of looking to either side at the meagre clientele, most of them huddled together in a deep, muttered conversation with the barman. “Nobody either of us knows. And if there’s any surveillance dust, I’d know about it.” Malky raised one arm above the table so that Hardenbrooke could see the databand fixed around his wrist.

  Hardenbrooke grimaced and sat down opposite him. Meeting in such a public place was a bad idea. Vasilevich sometimes put too much faith in modern technology, forgetting that there were simpler ways of finding out information. Seeing two people together, for instance, and drawing conclusions – what could be easier?

  “We could have met at my clinic. My security there is excellent.”

  Malky shook his head. “Look, you can be as careful as you like, but if you’re going to get caught out, then you’re going to get caught out, right?”

  Hardenbrooke said nothing, reflecting inwardly on why he disliked the other man so much.

  “Let’s get this over with. I just had a surprise visit from one of Draeger’s representatives. He was looking for information about Gallmon.”

  Malky shrugged, his gaze darting away from Hardenbrooke’s. “What’s it got to do with me?”

  “The man who visited me is called Marlin Smeby. He turned up unannounced and did everything but roast me over an open pit to extract answers. I can’t think of any reason for that, except maybe he smells a rat.”

  Malky laughed at this, and Hardenbrooke gave him a cold glare that could have frozen a volcano. “If something happens to me, Vasilevich, it happens to you too. Remember that.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten. Can you deal with this guy Smeby?”

  “Not in the way I think you mean. If anything happens to Smeby, Draeger won’t be fooled.”

  Malky nodded. Their business relationship spanned a few years now, and Malky had long been a distributor for Hardenbrooke’s seemingly endless supply of smuggled-in illegal bioware. That relationship had even blossomed for a while, until it had occurred to Hardenbrooke that blackmailing his best customer might be both profitable and convenient.

  This had provided surprising dividends for Malky. A little reading between the lines had made it clear to him that Hardenbrooke was supplying information not only to Max Draeger but also to Los Muertos, in what appeared to be a complex double-cross.

  Ha
rdenbrooke understood that Malky realized this, and in turn Malky understood that Hardenbrooke understood this, both of them in a kind of Mexican stand-off where each party simultaneously had everything and nothing to lose.

  Malky sighed and leaned back. “All right, then. What did you have in mind?”

  “My Stateside friends” – Malky grimaced; as if he didn’t already know exactly to whom Hardenbrooke was referring – “want Gallmon before Draeger gets his hands on him. Smeby has already met Gallmon in person.”

  Small beads of sweat appeared on Malky’s forehead. “Jesus. You mean they grabbed him?”

  “No, I mean Smeby invited Gallmon to a meeting, and Gallmon went along.”

  “But why? I mean, what’s so special about Kendrick?”

  “Who gives a damn about the reason? All I know is, Draeger is wise to us—”

  “Fuck off,” Malky snapped. “Wise to you, you mean. I never volunteered for all this shit.”

  “Either way, we have to move quick or it’s both our necks. Okay?”

  “Fine. Kidnap it is, then.” Malky let out a long breath. “One more level to add to my rich and colourful criminal career.”

  Hardenbrooke glared at him. “Listen to me, you’re going to help me with this or—”

  “Yes, I know,” Malky muttered in a tired voice. “Or I’m dead meat. But I’m not going to pretend I like it. Kendrick is a friend of mine.” He shook his head. “It still doesn’t make sense. What in God’s name do these people want with him?”

  “Either way, it’s your skin or his, Vasilevich.” Hardenbrooke gave a nasty smile, made all the more unpleasant by the way the scar tissue rucked up around one side of his face. “If we don’t give them exactly what they want, I can’t predict what they might do. But I can guarantee it wouldn’t be very pleasant for either of us.”

  30 June 2088

  Maze Internment Camp, Venezuela

  Six months had passed since Kendrick had watched Marco die in that detention centre, and during that time he’d come to wonder if perhaps he hadn’t died too and been reborn into Hell.