by Danie Ware
“It’s a self-adapting program, nothing more.” Her voice was earnest, tense with the beginnings of irritation. “It’s not real, Ecko, it’s just smart enough to respond to your choices. To learn, if you like. Every decision you’ve made, however small, rippled out to affect the entire pattern of the program’s future. You were its centre, your path undefined and free to choose whatever you wished to do. And with every choice you made, the pattern changed around you to ensure that you would still reach its end. And face your trials. And win. Without you there, it has no purpose. Does that make sense?”
“Shove it, sister.” He was moving now, all pins and needles and returning circulation. He ran a hand over himself, dashing the LEDs out of his skin, then slid his feet to the floor. His knees buckled, but he stood up.
His heartbeat reverberated from the walls.
Eliza backed up a step. “Your cortical plug is still locked. You shouldn’t be moving.”
“You gonna stop me?” His remaining nerve-clusters sparked, ripples and galaxies. Some of the delicate hardwires were falling away, or breaking. He smashed at them again, clearing more.
His skin was stained with their light.
“If I have to.” Her voice was without threat, but absolutely assured.
He bared his teeth at her. “Yeah right. So you tell me one thing,” he growled, a suggestion of coming thunder. He was gonna tear this damn place to pieces, any fucking second. Anything, to keep that program alive. “You tell me why. If all that’s not real, then why the hell go to all this trouble – just for li’l ol’ me?”
“Because of your passion, Ecko. Your drive and savagery.” She backed up, glanced quickly over his shoulder to the chair behind him. “Good, Evil, Order, Chaos, Fire, Ice, Technology, Magick. Inside, Outside. All opposites, and, at the end of the day, all the same. Whatever side of something you’re on, you have to believe in what you’re doing, and roar with that belief. Vahl was never the enemy – Roderick told you that, right at the beginning. This has been about defeating apathy, about Kazyen. Grey – Grey – is the enemy of all things. The enemy we face here too.”
“So – what? – is this all some sneaky fucking plot to topple the bad guys? Thanks to my guinea piggin’, or some unique synapse you’ve learned from my broken brain, you now have a program to fuck over Doctor Grey?”
That question made her smile, then she said, “I think this has gone far enough. You need that plug taken out before you can start recovery proper. Hatchetcease.”
Like some damned safeword, his adrenaline was gone. His knees went and he caught himself on the side of the chair, feeling weak and hollow.
“Shit. You fucking bitch.”
“So you’ve told me often enough,” Eliza said, flickering another smile. “Denial is inevitable in the early stages, as is a certain amount of… emotional readjustment.” She glanced again at the chair-back, a sharp glance, as if looking for something. “Just sit down, and try and breathe. If you fight this, it’ll just make it harder.”
So – what was she looking for? Back-up?
The thought made his adrenaline spark again, then splutter and cough like a failed engine. He was sick with nameless dread, right to his belly – like there was some monster lurking behind him.
Yeah. Take more than monsters to scare me.
He turned slowly to face it. He looked at – then past – the back of the chair.
And then he saw something else.
Behind the chair, there was a pulled curtain, heavy, white and featureless.
Before the curtain stood a silent figure in an enforcer’s white suit. Her hair was cut in a strict black bob, and her eyes were covered in mirrored shades. She stood with her arms folded, and she made no move as Ecko clocked her, neither recognition nor reaction. She simply stood there, boots gleaming.
Whoever she was, she must’ve been there all this time. Watching. Listening.
And he’d had no idea.
“Extra security?” He rounded on Eliza. “Think I’m gonna go off the deep end? Got that much faith in your own success?”
“No need to worry.” Her response was half soothing, half amused. “Ducarl’s just… keeping an eye.”
“On what?”
“You’re not the only person in my care.”
Not the only person.
The words made him stand upright, a sudden, nameless fear closing his throat. His knees shook, but he wasn’t going down, no fucking way. Not the only person. It hadn’t even occurred to him, but… were there others, in programs like his? Layers of them, like in Grey’s boxes? The worlds of anywhere-but-here?
And if they were all saving fucking Narnia, why did Eliza need a criminal enforcer?
“Ecko.” Eliza was speaking, urgent and soft. “We need to complete your closure.” Her calm had evaporated, she sounded almost nervous. “You can’t deal with the outside world with your cortical plug still powered.” The smile was brief, brittle. She was jittery, fearful of something. “There are risks we don’t need – ongoing depression, social maladjustment, psychotic episodes. Please, it’s in your own best interests.”
“You’re hidin’ something.” His certainty was absolute. “What you got? Illegal organs? Brainwashed slaves? Human lab rats? Any combo?” He was standing straight, his energy levels rising. He was right on the edge of something – and the feeling was good.
“Hatchetcease.” Her expression was almost panicked. “I say again, Hatchetcease.” She stepped back, glanced past him to where Ducarl stood silent. “Shit!”
The safeword was a blow, a double-fist – slam! – in the belly. But he’d faced Maugrim, Amal, Vahl, Grey – and that which hadn’t killed him was making him lace his shitkicker boots all the way to his fucking knees.
You made me like this. You deal with it.
Ironic much?
Legs firm, he took a step towards the curtain. The targetters on Ducarl’s shades tracked his motion, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care. What was she gonna do anyway, spike him with a boot heel?
Eliza said, “Ecko, don’t make me do this. That plug needs to come out before you leave this room. Please…”
“Please?” His adrenaline kicked again, and this time it caught, raced, sang, thrilling along his nerves, reverberating from the sensors in the room. “You put me through hell, and you say ‘please’? You tease me, and taunt me, and play with me, and now you want me to play nice?” The last of his starlights glittered, his pulse beat in his ears. On the screen beside him, there were still lingering ghosts, still wistful flickers of that other world – they seemed to lean in, as if eager. “Come on, bitch, what’s behind curtain number one?”
Eliza’s face went white as Fhaveon stone. She said, “Ecko. Stop this. I’ll put you down if I have to.”
“Fuck you. For the very last goddamn time. Fuck. You.”
So many times, so many times, those words had been in his mouth and his thoughts. Now, at last, he finally had the chance to tell her exactly what he thought of her, exactly how he felt about being forced and exposed and manipulated, exactly why he’d refused to capitulate for as long he had, exactly why Roderick’s sheer force of personality, his long faith and his love for his world, had affected Ecko deeply enough to make him change his mind.
But hell, she knew all that shit already.
He took another step. His adrenaline screamed at him.
He saw Eliza nod, her face a mask of regret and pain.
He saw Ducarl was moving.
His adrenaline shrilled even louder, higher than it had ever carried him – the rush was phenomenal. He wanted to cry out, laugh, cackle like some damned daemon. He wanted to tear the walls down. The world slowed round him, and he was faster than he’d thought, faster than he’d ever been.
For the first time, he was out of reach of Eliza’s will and power, now answerable only to his own sense of must.
You can’t stop me now, bitch!
The robotic doc was just close enough for him to reach.
<
br /> He lunged for it, heaved the thing off the floor. In exquisite slow motion, he saw the crosshairs in Ducarl’s shades track his movements, saw the pistol as she drew it from its shoulder-holster. He saw her elegantly taloned fingertip tighten on the trigger.
But he was a blur, faster than the pistol muzzle could track. The shot went off – he could almost watch the air ripple in response. He saw the screen flicker as it went through, heard the detonation as it took a chunk of plaster out of the far wall. Ducarl was swearing, her voice thick and slow; he heard her heels tick-tack on the lino. But he wasn’t waiting.
With an effort that made him curse, splinters of words spat through gritted black teeth, he heaved the ’bot bodily past the enforcer, at the curtain behind her.
Watched it rip the curtain free, and tumble, tangled, onto the floor.
And his answer was there.
Right in his face.
Sleeping like some fucking giant cherub.
No cortical plug, no ’trodes, no body covered in lights.
Just a drip in his arm.
Holy motherfucking shit.
But he’d known this, all along; he’d fucking known it!
The sleeping figure was a man. Blond, bearded, tattooed, built like that well-known brick shithouse. His stubbled scalp was wispy with growing hair, and though his face was turned away, Ecko didn’t need the shiny bald spot to tell him who it was.
Known this all along.
Lugan.
Lugan, who’d taken on Grey, who’d been there in The Wanderer. Lugan, who’d saved everything by finding Ecko just in time to kick his sorry ass…
Vision Quest.
Ecko glanced back at the fizzing screen, at the ghosts that still lurked within. He had no words, only this huge feeling of things locking into place, like everything was suddenly making sense.
He didn’t understand it completely, not yet, but any minute now…
“You sent him in after me.”
“No, Ecko, I didn’t.” Eliza’s voice was alight with tension. She looked over at Ducarl, held up a hand. She seemed to be choosing her words very carefully. “I saw him but I didn’t put him there. You can see for yourself – he’s not wired. There’s no way he could have shared your program. Lugan was spiked, hit with Lysergic acid diethylamide, not life-threatening, but enough to drop a bodyplating—”
“Bullshit,” Ecko said. He was trembling. “He was in there with me.”
“That’s not possible.” Her words were laden with fear.
Shaking now, sick with comedown, Ecko snarled at her, “He came in after me, you dozy bitch. Without him, I’d’ve failed the whole goddamn fuckin’ thing!”
She spread her hands, said, “Sometimes, the subconscious mind, in times of extreme stress, conjures—”
“Fucking horseshit. Either you put him there or he… Jesus, LSD? He was tripping?”
And yet, his dream was the same as mine. And that means…
“Ecko.” Eliza used his name like she’d grabbed his jaw and forced him to look at her. “Your program is a fiction, unique, created only for you, responsive only to you. Lugan was hallucinating after a drugs overdose.”
…it means it’s all connected. There’s more than one way in. And that means…
His mind clamouring impossibilities, Ecko ignored her. He was heading for the curtain, the fallen robot doc.
That means it’s all real.
Inside and outside, both the same. You fuckin’ said it yourself.
You really did create a world.
The thought made him want to laugh, to cheer, to find his friends and embrace them. To tell them, “It’s all right, it’s all right!”
She said, “You have to let this go. Let your program run its last scenes, and let it finish.”
He grinned. “I don’t think so.”
“Ecko, you need closure.”
He gave her the finger. “Close this.”
Her face tightened. She ran her hand through a mass of hair. “Please don’t make me do this.”
“You? Denying responsibility? Yeah right. Do your worst.”
“If I have to.” She nodded at Ducarl, and Ecko turned.
He saw the muzzle of the .357 come up, just like he’d once watched the whirling barrels of a minigun, seventy-six hours and a lifetime ago. He saw the crosshairs in her shades, saw them target, saw the lock, saw the pressure of the enforcer’s trigger finger. He was moving, reflexive, but without the adrenaline, he’d never fucking make it…
Over his head, he saw the flatscreens change. He saw the vastness of the dead Varchinde as if he were standing on the slopes of the western Kartiah. He saw the sunrise streak the soil in pink and yellow and gold.
It was beautiful.
And down there, he could see growth – only a little – but there were tiny uncoilings of green, bright fronds of hope scattered across endless death. The sky was blue and the clouds were white.
The spring would come, after all.
Because they had won.
He didn’t feel the bullet as it went through his chest. He didn’t feel himself fall back, his arms flying. He didn’t know that he’d hit the floor, his own blood puddling round him. He didn’t feel any of it, hell, it didn’t matter now. The hospital, the enforcer, the shrink, the room – the hurt – were all long gone.
He didn’t see the little nerve-lights extinguishing, one after another like stars tumbling from the sky.
There was no pain, no regret.
Because there, far out across the empty plain, the flags were flying from the top of Fhaveon city, and the world would be born anew.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
THE BIKE LODGE, LONDON
The Bike Lodge was closed.
Metal shutters had sealed off the end of the railway arch and police barriers had sealed off the end of the road. Since the disappearance of the business’s owner, the London Met had been all too pleased to remove one of the last free thorns that dug into their perfectly orderly side.
If any of them missed their custom chops, side projects that occupied garages and gleamed pointless on Sunday afternoons, then they were too smart to say so.
But Tarquinne Magdalene Gabriel was not concerned with the London Met.
Instead, she stood in the centre of the bleak and echoing space. She inhaled the smell of oil and scanned the cleaner patches on the walls where the posters had been torn away.
She tongued the diamond in her tooth, a reflexive habit when thinking.
Her ploy had succeeded.
Almost.
Everything had fallen into place – her brother had been put through the Rorschach program, and Lugan had been fool enough to touch the needle that she’d passed him. These two facts meant that Tam – Ecko – had successfully run the test gauntlet against Grey, and the program to take him down should run smoothly with what it had learned.
But Ecko had never recovered, been shot as a liability. She had no real feelings for her brother either way, but his loss was a nuisance.
She walked across the stained concrete floor, her heels clicking. The air was cold, and she wrapped her coat around her tightly with one arm as she used the other to push open the door to Lugan’s office.
It, too, was empty. Even the heavy and scarred desk had gone.
Fragments of forgotten paper fluttered in the sudden breeze – but there was nothing in here of any use whatsoever.
Checking annoyance, Tarquinne turned away. As she did so, a glint of something caught her eye. And there, in the corner of the room, half-buried under the tumbleweeds of garbage and dust, she saw the gleam of chrome.
She knew what it was, and bent to pick it up.
Blew the dust from it.
Thoughtfully, she read the inscription, and then flicked the little wheel. The yellow flame was bright and immediate, warm on her face.
Tarquinne Gabriel snapped the lighter shut, and she smiled.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIE WARE
is the publicist and event organiser for cult entertainment retailer Forbidden Planet. She has worked closely with a wide range of genre authors and has been immersed in the science-fiction and fantasy community for the past decade. An early adopter of blogging, social media and a familiar face at conventions, she appears on panels as an expert on genre marketing and retailing. Follow her on twitter @Danacea
WWW.DANIEWARE.COM
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