Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  “Just get out of here,” he heard McCowan mutter. Behind them the gold was dying, fading, the silver seeping through it like dye in water.

  “Not real,” Kendrick muttered to reassure himself as he found his way back to a stairwell and began to climb. “Just in my head.” He repeated the words over and over, like a mantra. He stopped at a door, thoughts whirling through his mind.

  He realized that Robert Vincenzo must have been the source of the original nanite infestation. The augmentations had extruded outside his body, spreading uninterrupted through the corridors and dark spaces of the Maze over the intervening years, some echo of the boy’s deranged mind still locked somewhere inside them. The same must have happened with McCowan and perhaps, somewhere out there, the corpses of other Labrats lay in mass graves with nanite filaments slowly infiltrating the surrounding earth. Perhaps their thoughts still flickered silently through dank, mossy soil even now . . .

  Laughter, high and child-like, echoed from far away in the darkness.

  In my head.

  “It’s not in your head, it’s real.” McCowan’s voice spoke as if from right behind Kendrick’s shoulder.

  “Fuck this! None of this is real!” Kendrick pressed forward, his muscles numb with fatigue. He moved steadily up and through innumerable stairwells and corridors.

  He was now out of the killing levels but still had a long way to go.

  The densely packed networks of filaments – all silver now, wherever he looked – were beginning to bubble up, like pockets of gas rising to the surface of heated liquid.

  As he got closer to a smooth dome of silver, several inches in diameter and protruding from the filament-dense wall, a homunculus-like shape began twisting under its oil-slick surface. As if waiting to be born.

  Kendrick backed away from it and something clattered to the ground by his feet. In my head, in my head. Panic swelled in him like a great black tide. More of the bubbles were forming all around him. He turned away and ran, adrenalin pushing him onwards, heading for the sunlight somewhere far above him.

  Several minutes passed before he realized that he’d dropped the torch.

  McCowan hovered, a constant invisible presence, just behind his shoulder.

  “There were more than you two down here,” Kendrick gasped. “What happened to them?”

  “Robert subsumed them, swallowed them up like Jonah’s whale. They weren’t from Ward Seventeen – didn’t have the strength, not like you and me.”

  Dragging himself up a stairwell, Kendrick found himself back in the Wards. A sound like a river rushing through the depths of the Maze swelled in the darkness behind him. He pushed through a door and slammed it shut. He grabbed a rusted bed frame and managed to wedge it against the door.

  Almost there, almost there.

  He hurried on into the corridor beyond, soon finding the central staircase leading upwards. Empty elevator shafts gaped like maws beside it.

  As Kendrick put one foot on a lower step he glanced down the long corridor nearby, seeing a cloud of tiny, winged figures racing around each other like angry wasps.

  Here, close to the surface levels, the walls weren’t so thickly coated with the threads. But even as he watched, a patch of silver smoothed and rounded, budding within seconds. He gaped as the silver took on a sudden golden hue. The bud instantly faded back into the wall, as if never there at all.

  Peter is doing this, he realized. Holding Robert back.

  Kendrick staggered forward again, all sense of time lost. The corridors became infinite, stretching into darkened eternity. But something kept him going, his body just a machine transporting his awareness through the lightless depths.

  The outside world lay somewhere ahead. A dim greyness became more than a hint of light, resolving itself into a faraway point glimmering at the centre of his universe.

  “Almost there,” McCowan muttered encouragingly in his ear. Except, of course, McCowan was now in him, not outside. Once they’d left the Maze, would they go on sharing his head? Or would there be an end to it?

  Kendrick stumbled into painfully bright morning sunlight, shielding his eyes until his augmented vision adjusted. The sun was still low on the horizon, burning off moisture from the surrounding jungle vegetation. Fatigued and shaken, he sucked in air perfumed with a thousand scents . . .

  . . . And stopped again. His skin tingled, everywhere across his legs and his back. Almost a burning sensation . . .

  He spotted Buddy standing not too far away, on the crest of a low hill overlooking the plain on which the Maze stood. His arms were folded casually, like those of some tourist checking out the sights.

  Buddy turned, as if subliminally aware of Kendrick’s sudden presence. He started towards him, smiling widely. But Buddy’s smile faded quickly, replaced by an expression of horror.

  “Jesus Christ, Kendrick, your face—”

  Kendrick looked down at his bare hands, at the lines and vague shapes he could now see writhing beneath his skin. Filaments slid through his flesh like fine subcutaneous webbing. He reached up, his fingertips tracking the same fine, thread-like lines slithering under his cheeks, his nose, his ears, over his skull. He made a sound like a whimper and fell to his knees.

  Buddy ran over to grab him by the arm, but Kendrick waved him away, “Don’t touch me.”

  “C’mon, Kendrick, we have to get you to a hospital or something.”

  Kendrick gasped. He wanted to burn his own flesh off, to hack it away, to tear it from his bones in great bloody strips. Looking at Buddy, he couldn’t fail to see the revulsion that the other man couldn’t quite hide.

  Summer 2088 (exact date unknown)

  The Maze

  The shield door froze halfway, forcing Kendrick to squeeze through a narrow gap. But it had opened, and he could hear voices: people talking excitedly, shouting.

  Something thundered with a long, low vibration that rattled through the pipes and conduits lining the ceiling. He could see the shapes of other Labrats watching in the darkness. The gun turret near the shield door stood silent, motionless.

  Static hissed from the tannoy speakers. Something had happened to the soldiers and scientists who had been guarding them. Kendrick knew in an instant that they had a real chance at escape.

  He stepped forward again. The gun turret remained dormant. A figure moved towards him from up ahead. After a moment he realized that it was Buddy.

  “Kendrick, is that you?”

  The others were coming closer now. He could sense them shuffling and moving and muttering around him in the dark, shadows against shadows.

  “There’s a way out,” he told them, letting the gas mask drop from his fingers. Buddy gaped down at it, wide-eyed.

  “Where did you —?”

  “Sieracki’s men didn’t get everything. What happened here while I was down below?”

  “We heard shooting over the tannoy, then it went dead, like you can hear now. That was a couple of hours ago. And loud booming noises, like something’s been blown up.” Buddy grimaced. “We thought you were both dead. You were in there a lot longer than anyone else so far. Is Peter—?”

  “He’s dead. We found this gas mask – that’s what kept me alive.”

  Buddy eyed Kendrick uncertainly.

  “It wasn’t like that. He deliberately saved my life. Listen, I think we can get out of here. There’s a way.”

  Kendrick pressed his hand and cheek against the great shield door that separated the lower levels from the Wards above. It buzzed with energy under his touch. He closed his eyes, hearing people shuffling and muttering behind him. He had to do this or they would lose all hope of survival.

  He slid his hand across the door’s surface. Something surged and shifted beneath his touch. A hollow rattle sounded from somewhere deep inside it – and he felt it shift.

  “Now,” he said, standing. “Push.”

  At first he thought he’d failed, as a dozen pairs of hands belonging to people weak from hunger and thirst press
ed against unyielding metal. Then something internal gave and the door slid aside, fraction by fraction, its hinges squealing in protest. Kendrick pressed harder, feeling something else give. Shouts of exclamation rang out as the door moved freely now, swinging wide to reveal the long corridors and ascending stairwells beyond.

  Free! Kendrick stared at the soft glow of electric lights in the distance. They were free.

  It soon became clear that the Maze was under attack. As for its soldiers and scientific staff, they found several men, half out of their uniforms, gazing up at ceilings as though they could see through them to some point beyond. One man lay crumpled in a corner, his face glistening with some thread-like substance that glittered as though it was some rare and precious metal. His features were peaceful, and he appeared to be unaware of their approach.

  Kendrick moved past him, caught up in a great flood of bodies. He twisted, staring as the soldier died, oblivious, under a hail of fists and stamping feet.

  They found others, cowering in laboratories and offices, as the mob moved on, meeting no resistance. Many of the Maze’s staff died during this exodus, beaten to death with anything that came to hand. Kendrick followed the inmates’ example, unable and unwilling to resist the desire for vengeance.

  One or two Labrats fell, shot by the few remaining guards. But the rest of the prisoners, caught up in a whirlwind of mindless rage, surged forward regardless, the soldiers dying under a torrent of blows.

  A sound like muted, distant thunder came from somewhere yet higher up. They swarmed through the Wards in their hundreds, lifting men and women out of their beds where they found them alive, and leaving the corpses behind. They moved on more slowly now; they were becoming tired.

  Finally they reached the surface level, staggering numbly up staircases and along corridors as the Maze staff – so very few of them now – fled at their approach, their yells of warning reverberating into the distance.

  Kendrick moved on with the rest, always upwards, horrified by what he could now see of his own body in the brilliant electric light illuminating the upper levels. His clothing was reduced to less than rags, his scarred flesh smeared with blood and grime.

  Gazing down a final passageway, he spotted natural sunlight streaming through a door at the far end. The ground rocked again beneath their feet and Kendrick knew that – at last – someone had come to rescue them.

  26 October 2096

  Los Angeles

  Kendrick still dreamed of endless corridors.

  Sometimes he burned with a strange silvery light. Other times he died, over and over again, the stiff black handle of a razor-sharp knife protruding from his chest, the pain unimaginable. He remembered dying in two different ways. He remembered running to escape from someone with his own face, then slumping against a wall, unable to breathe in the poisoned air.

  Kendrick opened his eyes to the broad grey blur of rotors slicing through the air above him. He lifted his head from the co-pilot’s seat and gazed out and down to the landscape below.

  Struggling upright, he could see smoke rising from campfires several hundred metres below. How long had he been asleep? He dragged his scattered thoughts together, and caught Buddy’s eye when the other glanced briefly over.

  Los Angeles, he remembered now. Buddy was taking them to Los Angeles.

  He’d obviously been unconscious for most of the journey. He felt obscurely grateful for that. Now he was looking down on the reconstructed parts of the city. He was familiar with television footage of the ultra-modern spires, like shards of crystal rising quite literally from the ashes. But now that he was actually here, those occasional oases of light and technology appeared uncomfortably poignant amid so much unreclaimed devastation.

  Stroking the back of one hand, Kendrick started tracing the new whorls and shapes underlying the skin, reflecting that since he’d made his way back to the sunlight McCowan had vanished from his senses.

  A little while later another glance downwards revealed a huge encampment of tents spread far across a hill. Among them the symbol of the Red Cross was prominent. He suddenly thought of Hardenbrooke, and of what it must have been like to be here when the city was destroyed.

  Soon they passed over a recognizably military encampment with trucks and jeeps standing in ordered rows, all painted in their camouflage colours.

  As if reading his thoughts, Buddy smiled reassuringly. “Mexican Army. Remember, California is barely part of the US any more. Not that it’d be much of a prize anyway, since the economy and everything went tits-up after the nuke. Washington’s got its hands full enough with breakaway republics, without worrying too much about who’s left in charge of a bunch of ruins.”

  The helicopter ripped on through the sterile LA skies. Here and there, areas that had miraculously survived the devastation could be seen. But Kendrick was shocked at how much of the city was still in ruins after so many years.

  Deserted five-lane freeways stretched in parallel lines towards the ocean and, as they dropped lower, Kendrick noticed scores of abandoned swimming pools scattered across the side of a hill, next to the ruins of expensive mansions. He vividly recalled detailed news footage of the Beverly Hills burning.

  The pools themselves looked like half-revealed bones bleached white in the merciless heat of the sun. Elsewhere, what had once been boulevards full of expensive boutiques and fashionable galleries had been reduced to abandoned shanty-towns. Everywhere around them the palm trees grew wild.

  As Buddy guided his aircraft towards the ground people gazed up at them from a wide expanse of unkempt grass that rose and dipped with artificial uniformity. Nearby stood a group of buildings, some half-demolished, some apparently built of random detritus, roofed over with sheets of corrugated metal. Some of the open land nearby had been tilled, and new crops grew on it in rows. It took a moment for Kendrick to realize that he was looking down on an erstwhile golf course. All around it the rusted skeletons of cars were scattered across the cracked tarmac.

  Kendrick stepped out of the helicopter, the whine of its rotor blades dropping rapidly, and blinked in the bright Californian sunshine. The people he’d noticed earlier were moving towards them, dragging a huge green tarpaulin behind them. Buddy dropped down from the cockpit and ran towards them to grab one edge of it. Kendrick stood by as they hauled the tarpaulin over the ’copter.

  Buddy then stepped over and clapped him on the back, but it wasn’t hard for Kendrick to sense just how uneasy his friend was.

  “What’s the tarpaulin for?”

  “Smothers the heat signature.” Buddy turned to greet Veliz who was standing chatting with the others. “Hey, Samuel, still got any of that Mexican beer?”

  Kendrick’s skin itched in the early-evening heat. He felt drowsy from the food and drink that he’d been given. They sat out in the open air by a crackling log fire built in a circle of bricks. Nearby stood half a dozen patched-together vehicles which, contrary to their appearances, apparently did function. Kendrick gazed numbly into the flames, the stars overhead, trying hard not to think of anything in particular.

  A woman came over, although he couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t get too close. Her face cracked open in an uneasy grin – there was something likeable about her.

  “Still hungry?” she asked. “Could getcha ’nother bite to eat.”

  “I’m fine for now.” Kendrick shrugged. “It’s sort of hard to believe that everyone here is a Labrat. Haven’t seen this many of us together in one place since . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

  She nodded. “Same for all of us, yeah.”

  He studied her more closely, wincing when he saw how close she looked to dying. She was in the advanced and final stages of rogue augmentation growth, her neck dark with the spread of nanite threads inside her, thick cords of the material distorting her cheeks and lips.

  Kendrick felt a powerful stab of pity. He looked away.

  Shortly after the woman had left him, Kendrick made his way to the building wh
ere he would be spending the night. Right now he wanted to be somewhere inside rather than being watched by scared eyes out in the open.

  He found his way to a communal bathroom and stared for a long time at his moonlit reflection in the fly-specked mirror hanging from a nail above the washbasin. The room was little more than a cupboard with a chemical toilet, although the sink was at least plumbed in. Instead of a door, a dark wool curtain had been tacked onto the frame.

  Kendrick tugged at a light cord and a halogen bulb lit up, sending shimmering sparkles skittering off the filaments that now coated his face. His gaze tracked them down the curve of his neck, seeing how they disappeared beneath his shirt collar.

  “What’s happening to me?” he whispered to no one. There was no sign of McCowan. Was that a bad sign? There was no way of knowing.

  “You okay there?” a voice said quietly. Kendrick looked around to see the woman to whom he’d briefly spoken earlier, peering at him around the edge of the curtain.

  “I never caught your name,” he replied.

  “Audrey,” she said. “I wasn’t spying, I just heard you talking to yourself.” Through the now open door behind her he could see pots hanging on hooks in what was obviously a kitchen.

  “Buddy mentioned you before,” she continued, “so I got the impression you were on our side. But I can see the way you look at us, like you think all of us here are crazy. You were in Ward Seventeen, right?”

  Kendrick nodded, and stepped out of the bathroom to stand closer to her. Audrey’s words were friendly enough but, whatever their shared experiences, he reminded himself that he didn’t really know these people. So he chose his own words carefully. “I was, yes, but according to Buddy it hasn’t been exactly the same for me as for the rest of you.”

  “But you saw it – the visions? Buddy said you did.”

  “I saw some of what the rest of you saw, but I was receiving special medical treatments that stopped me getting all of it. To be honest, I don’t know if I’m ready to believe that any of what I’m told you’ve all seen is real.”