by Danie Ware
Time.
As his vision cleared, he saw he was covered with a sea of tiny, acupuncture-like needles, thousands of them in star-system clusters, each one ending in the minute gleam of an LED. Some of the clusters were hardlined, wires delicate and alive, others simply flickered at him, amused by his wakefulness.
His whole damn body was a pattern of lights.
Panic rose, closing his throat. Somewhere he could hear the heart-rate monitor picking up speed. He tried to move, to scrabble backwards, away from the needles and the prodding and the poking and the electronic web, right back out of the seat, but that chill hand hadn’t left his shoulder. It rested harder, order rather than request.
He turned to look up at the woman.
Wondered who the hell she was.
She was slight and earnest, too young for her frown. Her white coat was pristine, her mass of dark hair pulled neatly back. She had two steel-rimmed sockets, one under each ear – looked kinda like she’d had her restraining bolt removed.
But that wasn’t the freaky thing.
Nope, the freak show was her hands, the touch on his shoulder, the gentle chill that had opened his eyes… They were graceful, perfect surgical steel; there were too many fingers and all of them with too many joints. They were fingers that ended in needles and blades and gauges and other shit he didn’t even want to think about. They were arachnid, beautiful and horrifying. Christ, they were almost like something Mom would’ve made.
Mom…
Memories shivered in the back of his head, but he wasn’t ready for them. He searched the woman’s face, said, “Who’re you? Esme Scissorhands?”
She smiled, stretched out her fingers. As he watched, they folded carefully down to normal sizes, each one sliding over and together with minute precision. She pulled on flesh-covered gloves. They settled into place, and the line between glove and skin faded into nothing.
Perfect.
“I’m Elizabeth,” she said, flexing her new fingers. “Elizabeth Hope Shakespeare, no relation. You can call me Eliza.”
* * *
Eliza.
The word was a shock of reality, a glass tumbling slowly to the clean and tiled floor.
Eliza.
Flickers and phantoms, a rush of dream-imagery. Flashes of fragments as the glass detonated. Splinters, shining in the light.
Bloody handprints across a shattered wall.
One-hand-then-two.
But he wasn’t facing that shit – no way, no how, not yet.
Instead, he shoved the images aside and pulled himself further upright. He felt the tug at his brainstem, the nerve needles twitching in his skin. There was a surgical robot lurking to one side of his chair, quiescent and sinister. Behind it, a projection screen hung in the empty air. It was curved, half transparent, and it fizzed silently with a mosaic of white noise.
It revolted and compelled him – like seeing his own body opened in autopsy.
Eliza.
She handed him a steel beaker – water. “Don’t worry if your memory’s a little unsteady,” she said. “We can help you unscramble it all, put everything back in order, that’s why we’re here. Do you… what’s the last thing you remember?”
Falling down, down into the screaming and the dark.
Ignoring her question, he took a lukewarm sip and felt his mouth ulcers sting. The pain was good, real. It cleared his head.
“Where the hell am I?” His voice ground, metal and rust. He jerked his chin at the screen. “An’ what the fuck’s that?”
“Don’t worry about that for the moment.” She took the beaker back and patted his arm. “For now, you need to gather your thoughts, recover. Piecing everything back together can be a bit… strange, but we’ve sourced some core triggers to help you through it.” She reached into a pocket of her coat, pulled something free. “Do you recognise this?”
Triggers.
Alexander David Eastermann.
Lugan’s lighter.
And the memory was clear as a slap, as a glass splinter in the face – he was flicking the lid, spinning the wheel. “Outta gas.” There was a man speaking to him, tall and lean, “The Wanderer finds many things… just like it found you. It’s a portent, I think.”
Roderick.
And now the surge rose, shattering the floodgates. The rush swamped him, bore him down. It tumbled him over and over. It robbed him of breath, pulled him under, left him gagging for bare life.
The Wanderer, the ruins of Tusien, the moss in Amethea’s skin, Redlock fighting with flashing axes, monsters of stone and creatures of flame, Maugrim taunting them all. The mad old man in the corridors of Amos. Nivrotar, monochrome perfection. The stone walls of Aeona, creatures created, Amal cutting into his chest. Roderick’s steel throat, Khamsin, writhing with savage power. Triqueta, glowing like opal and sunshine.
It was too much, too intense. He was shuddering with an overload of comprehension. He spread his fingers, tried to catch this image, that one. He tried to cry out but the ulcers were hurting and he’d no words to form what was—
Still, they kept coming.
Warfare before the walls of Tusien, Sical, Rhan blazing righteous. Warriors and monsters and dying children. And then dust, desolation endless, the barren and empty plain. Rural dystopia, everything dead. Those final moments as they faced Vahl across the fissure that had riven the world.
A single image, stark and jagged: The Wanderer, in ruins.
And then, rising like some deity over the tavern’s broken roof, Doctor Slater Grey himself, the needle marks in his arms all puckering in invitation. He grew to huge size, his mouth widening—
No!
Grey made Ecko angry, reflexive, unavoidable. He fought the image back. But he was caught in Grey’s bolt-hole, passive and obedient, he was drudging to work, empty and content; he was falling from the roof with the ’bot loosing a volley after him, hi-explosive detonations that shook the London night.
The drizzle sparkled like shrapnel.
Lugan?
The maelstrom of images passed him and was gone, burbling into the distance. He sat still, shaking, his breathing ragged, and tried to work out what the hell had just happened.
Luge?
But no, there was no Lugan. Not here.
There never had been.
In his head, the colours were gone. There was only the steel room, the steel chair, the steel lighter. Even as the memories faded, he understood that they’d been somehow false, no more than some vast and complex dream.
And as he blinked at the wires and the lights, so their cold reality sank its blade all the way home, right into his heart, grinning as it did so. All those memories, hopes, fears, lives, deaths, everything he’d seen and felt and learned and loved and hated…
Gone.
None of it… Jesus… none of it had ever really happened.
No.
He couldn’t wrap his brain round it. It was too powerful, too recent. Too big. It made his brain fizz like the screen. Even as he tried to unscramble what had happened, where it all began and ended, he was trying to encompass… No, it was too much.
You can’t do that… you can’t’ve just done that… just taken it all away…
He stared at the curved screen, his own, now-blank Fourth Wall. He wanted to see something, someone, wanted to reach out for it all. Prove it had happened. That everything he’d lived through, friends and fights and foes and fuck-ups, all of it…
It was just so much Unreality TV.
His mouthful of bitterness was tangible, so strong his expression contorted.
He’d been programmed. Fucking puppeteered. Up on that screen like a porn star. Daaaance. Chrissakes, talk about a violation – boots in his brain, kicking into places that were private. Teasing him with images, people, places that hurt, that made him feel. Rearranging his shit, his personal shit, that was no one else’s damned business. Displaying it. Forcing him to game, to dance at the end of a chain…
Dance, Ecko, daaaaaanc
e—
The patterns of needles winked at him like some vast and fractal joke.
Oh, you motherfucking bitch!
Eliza’s voice came faintly through a distant, tinnitus hum. Now, more of it was coming back: he was remembering layers. Not just the story itself, but its curses and doubts. Eliza. Creator. World Goddess. His clamours to be free, his determination to win through. His capitulation. His freedom, and his lack of it.
His anger.
Daaaaaaance, Ecko…
It made his stomach lurch. He brought up the water, puked it onto the floor. He felt unsteady enough to tumble sideways, to drown in the gleam of bile in the lights. He clung to the chair, thought of falling, of Grey, of worlds within worlds, of mirrors that reflected only mirrors. Of fractal patterns, endless. Of Lugan in The Wanderer, of Roderick in London…
Shit!
The room was spinning, now. Edges of images whispered into being, vanished again.
Too much to process. He was losing his goddamned fucking mind.
And hadn’t she been supposed to fix it?
Hadn’t that been the point?
He found himself laughing, rising into hysteria, and he strangled the noise to a stop.
“Ecko,” Eliza said, warm and calm, as if to a child. “It’s all right. Sometimes, these recollections can be… very powerful. But the shock will pass, if you give it a moment, everything will settle into its proper place. You’ve achieved… something phenomenal.” She dropped the lighter back into her pocket. “It might help to know how it ends. Maybe give you some closure?”
Ends?
The word brought him up short, and he stared at her. Ends? All of those memories, everywhere he’d just been, the whole world and story that had surrounded him. He was still resonating with it, and struggling with it not being real. How could it just…?
He looked back at the screen, then back at her face. “What?”
“In fact,” Eliza said, “we should take that step now. Then we can concentrate on a proper recovery.”
There was a throb in his brainstem.
And the phantoms started to move.
* * *
There!
In one place, to the far right, a city. He recognised it as Roviarath, her Great Fayre rotting and ruinous. The river was empty and the wharves broken, the soil was cracked and bare. The city’s people were gathering at her outskirts, stood with cart and wagon and emaciated beastie.
Roviarath was being evacuated.
Ecko stared, transfixed, biting his lower lip. There was a tiny figure on a black horse standing in his stirrups and gesturing orders. Ecko could almost hear him barking commands and rounding up the city’s survivors. He watched as the people, small as toys, formed into a refugee column and headed out across the dead plain.
He’d no clue how they’d cross the intervening ground – or how many of them would survive.
Behind them, the cracks in the ground reached the lighthouse tower. It sagged sideways and fell with Koyaanisqatsi slowness, its great rocklight tumbling, extinguished at last.
He found a lump in his throat and he swallowed, blinking.
Ends.
There, in another place, Tusien – the great ruin black against a burning sunset. The force there was moving out, leaving its dead and its debris, and mustering to go home. Ecko saw centaurs. He saw Nivrotar, her hands full of knotted bits of cord, gesturing to the columns of warriors, all of them laden with packs. As the image moved, out through the open holes in the walls to the long staircase at the back of the ruin, he saw a slender golden figure stood alone, her gold hair blowing.
Triqueta.
Ecko found himself lifting a hand. His oculars strove to bring her closer. He realised what had happened, though he still couldn’t see it clearly. There, under the great wall of the ruin, was the long barrow that was the grave of Tusien’s Lord. Beside it were marks of newly dug long pits, each one headed with a cairn of broken stones. At one end stood the grave of Tan Commander Mostak, and at the other…
Before it, his axes in her hands, Triqueta stood silent and tearless. The lines in her face were somehow tempered, lean and strong, and her brassard caught the last of the light. She had a long task ahead of her, but she no longer had any fear.
And he understood, on some level, that what she had given him was the very last night of the youth she’d lost.
Triq.
He tasted her name, remembered her words…
When all this is over, is it you who fades out of existence? Or is it us? Or do we?
Another view – another grave. This one unmarked, alone amidst the death that surrounded the great fissure, and he knew before looking whose it was. Over it, Rhan was huddled on his knees, racked by sobbing, crying from heart and soul, his face contorted with the force of it. He was saying, “Thea. Little priestess. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Humility is the hardest lesson of all. The Bard stood by him, hand in his hair, and Rhan’s head rested on the man’s lean, black-clad hip.
But Roderick’s face was turned upwards, etched in both joy and sorrow, his eyes closed at the sky. With another shock of insight, Ecko realised what the Gods had given Rhan as his final gift, his reward for his long service and his victory.
He was mortal. He would age, and he would die.
Finally, he would go home.
But the grave was changing. As the sky overhead glowed with sunrise light, so new grass was uncurling, growing where Amethea had fallen.
The Monument has my answers too, I can feel it.
She was the Soul of the Stone, the heart of the world, its new growth and recovery. Her life had cured the blight.
He blinked water, it slid down his face unheeded.
Eliza said gently, “Calm, Ecko. Watch.”
And there, in the centre of the screen’s curve, the rising streets of Fhaveon. People, blinking, stumbling from the Cathedral’s doors and out onto the broken mosaic.
Pushing through the heaving roadways, there was a woman, tired and road-stained. She was massive in shoulder and her skin was etched with myriad elaborate scars. Ecko recognised her as the young woman from the corridor – when the mad Ress had spoken to him about Kazyen. Jayr. She seemed older, somehow, and he could take a guess at why.
She came to the great doors of the Palace and spoke to the guard. Even as she did so, the door was opened and Roderick stood there, staring at her with his face a mask of shock. As Ecko watched, she held out to him an overshirt, as filthy as she was. It seemed to be covered in some kind of writing.
Roderick took it, turned it over and over, fascinated. And then he started to laugh, to laugh as if he would cry. When the woman looked at him sideways, he apologised and then – to her surprise – he sank to one knee right there in the doorway.
“My Lord,” he said. “Welcome home.”
Ecko thought he was smiling, but it was too small to see.
The images on the screen were fading, now, dissolving back to white noise. He found himself almost panicking, he didn’t want to lose them – he tried to think about Triqueta, about Amethea and Redlock. He tried to focus on the Bard, on The Wanderer – on the tavern created anew and there on the city streets of Fhaveon, warm lights in its windows. He needed it, couldn’t bear to let it go.
Or is it us?
“And so we come to the resolution,” Eliza said softly. “You’ve won, Ecko. The Lord Valiembor is returned, with her the world’s memory. Fhaveon will be rebuilt, with survivors to sing Amethea’s name, and Redlock’s. And yours. To sing of Triqueta and her Red Rage. Of Rhan and Vahl, and their endless war. And the Bard will tell your stories, over and again, until the end of the Count of Time. Take a moment if you need one, but then we have to move on.”
But…
How can he fucking sing if you turn him off?
“No.” The protest was immediate, instinctive. He was still watching them, though there was little now to see. He wasn’t here, in this clinical testing zone, he was there in that world, wan
ting it to survive and thrive and flourish. He wanted to know the rest of the story, to watch the cities rebuild, the grass regrow. He wanted to know what would happen to Triqueta without Redlock, without Amethea, without the Banned. Would she take command of the military in Fhaveon? With Jayr as her Lord and the ageing Rhan beside her? Where had Vahl gone? The Kas? He wanted to know how they’d rebuild, wanted to know if he’d missed anything, unlocked every level. He needed to be there as they recovered, needed to watch their story unfold, know what would happen next…
“You can’t just flick a switch,” he said softly. “They’re all real, they think for themselves, they feel. You can’t just—”
“They’re code, Ecko,” she told him gently. “They’re nothing.”
The word went through him like a shock, its symbolism knocking the breath out of him. His heart started to pound, the sound all around him, everywhere. Nothing – his ultimate bad guy, and with the flick of a finger she could condemn—
“Don’t!”
Her hands were reaching for the plug in the back of his head.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” Sick to his belly, he was flooded with terror. Ferocious from their long hiatus, his adrenals screamed wonkily into life, making the sea of lights that covered him flicker like angry stars. “Don’t you fucking touch me.” Panicked, he wanted to take her wrist and snap it, break her to the floor and kick and kick and kick, but his legs were still too weak. “It’s all real, all of it. You can’t just turn them off.” He barely understood what he was saying; he was pleading, panicked, words falling over themselves. “How could any game be that complex? Those characters, how could—?”
“You had a world made for you, Ecko,” Eliza said softly. “A pattern crafted from your synapses, a fractal reality that grew with every question, that changed and shifted with every choice you made. Yes, you had characters that acted independently of your presence, that interacted with each other as well as with you.” Her voice was calm, soothing as milk. “It made them three-dimensional, stopped them being the town merchant that only ever has the weapons and treasure that you sell to him. But that doesn’t make them real—”
“What’re you now, Philip K. Dick?” His fear was becoming anger, cleansing. His adrenals gave him energy and he could feel his limbs respond, return to life. His targetters kicked, crossing her face, her throat. “World Goddess, they called you. You made that world: you built it, you built yourself into it. From its earliest mythology, all the way up. You, an’ Collator. An’ Grey, my end-of-level Nasty. An’ whether the characters are code or not, they believe they’re real. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll die—”
