Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  This place is alive. The air fills my lungs like never before.

  I track down Carrolla. At least three months have passed since our encounter with the Don. Through the sense of him in the bonds, I find the hospital he was admitted to, then the apartment he took and the job he found.

  It's a bar near the wall. He's working on the counter when I walk in, favoring his hand with its fingers re-attached. The place is nothing like the bars of the Skulks, built out of flotsam. Everything here is sheer and shiny, clean and new, with fake bleach pine and brushed chrome.

  I stand in front of him. He looks at me for a long moment before he realizes who I am. Then he gasps.

  "What in the hell? Rit. What are you doing here?"

  I look at his hand on the bar. You can hardly see the scars; tiny suture lines at the knuckle. He pulls it away as if ashamed. His teeth set tightly and he pales a little.

  "I know you're angry," I say. "I would be too. But I want you to know Don Zachary will never come looking for you."

  He studies me. I can feel his disbelief. That I'm here, that I'm telling the truth. He eyes the door nervously. Probably he thinks I've sold him out? But what sense would that make, when the Don only wanted me?

  "Did you kill him?" he asks.

  "No. I Lagged him."

  He stares at me. "You Lagged the Don? How? How would you even get close?"

  I shrug. The moment cracks open, and he starts to laugh. "Ritry goddamned Goligh. You are one crazy son of a bitch."

  I smile. "How are your fingers?"

  He flips me off. A moment passes. We are not in the Skulks anymore. Whatever we had before isn't the same over here. There's something still, but it's weak, and soon it will be gone.

  That's OK.

  "They have Arcloberry here?" I ask.

  He grins. "Not here. But we'll find some."

  We walk out like that, big model-looking Carrolla dressed in his bar bowtie, me in a sharp black suit, and find another bar. We toast each other and everything we've achieved, in escaping the Skulks. It's a good night, and the last of its kind.

  I sleep that night in a business hotel designed for travelers come from the neighboring cities on the Calico range; Tenbridge Wulls and Saunderston. It's high up and has a great view of the wall, peeking over the lip to the endless gray beyond. It is strange to feel protected, for once. My War built all of this, and I deserve to feel safe.

  I check my accounts. Money has been piling up in them for years: interest from the pay-off I got after quitting active coalition service and money I put aside from the jack-site. There was nothing to spend it on in the Skulks.

  I go to sleep thinking about Carrolla. I don't expect to see him again.

  Days pass in peace. I find an apartment near the high-class Reach, with a view of the city. I don't want to see the water any more. I walk. Calico is calm, safe, and restful. People go where they go and do what they do bound by clear, clean laws. I reflect on this collation détente we have arrived at. It only took the destruction of the world to reach it.

  I stand in a park and look up at he towers of the Reach; they are vast, soaring into the sky, and I am now at the bottom of them all, but I am glad of it. Thirty-seven years old, and I have a new start. Within a month I find work as a licensed Soul Jacker's assistant in a low-floored lab, where none of the technicians are ex-marines, where sex never precedes or follows an implantation, and where they never jack deeper than the outer boundary of security their technology can provide against the Lag.

  There is no risk. Instead of the natural massage of sex as a balm after the rough process of memory injection, they administer artificial chemical cocktails so expertly constructed and fine-tuned to the host that the mind barely notices the difference. Even so, the process still requires a warm and relaxed human touch, making a good bedside manner essential. I have that. For the rest, I tuck my chin in and my head down and do the work.

  For one year I man a sonic basin, trusted only to stand nearby while the patients watch colorful displays thrum their pulse back at them through audio and visual displays. I don't socialize much, though I go to meetings for recovering alcoholics. I don't drink.

  A year in they promote me to administering Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, the liquid that bathes and cools the brain. I study hard at nights, learning their rules and the new and proper way to jack the mind. I earn all the certificates I can, by far the oldest student in all my night classes, and within two years am manning the EMR and preparing syringes of silvery engrams to inject.

  It takes three years in all before they let me lead a jack. It feels like returning to an old friend. They are all watching, my new colleagues and workmates, many of them younger than me, more educated than me, kids from the Reach and partners from the firm, waiting to see if I choke.

  Will I jack too deep and go organic, back to my old way of the Skulks? Will I panic and regress, forcing the machine into damage control?

  They don't know me at all. I jack the brain like a virtuoso conductor, using all the tricks and techniques I'd learned before in concert with the new technology. The patient says afterward it was the smoothest engram he'd ever received, so seamless and integrated he couldn't distinguish it from his real knowledge. He tells me all this in fluent Hexi-Canton, the language engram I implanted.

  I do it in the fastest time anyone in my jack-site has seen. Soon the partners are knocking on the door of my office to ask me how I did it. I tell them what I can, what I am able to put into words. I am a giver now, not a taker.

  One day the tsunami comes.

  It's a big one, enough to toss a few of the Skulks up and over the wall itself, crushing the rest under thirty feet of water. Nobody in Calico is hurt, because we are ready, though everyone on the Skulks will be dead. Everyone I once knew, rubbed out, except perhaps Don Zachary in his underwater bunker.

  My new life goes on. I meet a woman called Loralena, of proto-Rusk stock. She is nothing like the women of my past, or any of the girls from the Skulks. She is utterly self-possessed, in control of her emotions and heart but still alive in every moment.

  She is an artist of some medium fame, who specializes in painting with information from the brain. She takes Cerebro-Spinal Fluid samples and EMR brainscans from famous politicans, businesspeople and artists and extrapolates the resulting data into vast, riotous tableaux of color. I meet her at a Soul Jacker party for funders, when one of the partners introduces us.

  "You should sample Ritry," he says. "He's a complete mystery. Perhaps you'll get back to us with the inside scoop on how he does what he does."

  Polite laughter, he nudges my shoulder, and I smile.

  "I'd love to," she says. "Ritry, when will you come by?"

  I make some polite hemming and hawing about soon, and I'd be delighted. We move on to talk about the Skulks, and she espouses her theories on re-absorption, about how everything that dies doesn't really die but gets taken up again in a different way. It doesn't matter if it's matter, energy, or thought, which she said was a kind of energy itself.

  "It all comes around," she says with vivacious light in her eyes. "It all circulates."

  She is stunning, for how alive she is. When she isn't speaking she listens intently, and sips on her ancient-genome rye and ice. I can feel that she is hoovering all this up, not just the words and the tastes but the mood, every single tiny gesture. She is three years my junior, has curly auburn hair that makes me think of summers that I never saw, and radiates a fierce wonder and curiosity about everything that lights me up inside.

  I go to her studio the next day for the sample, in the lower hills of the Rise. It is large and white on the outside, amongst a hillscape of large white villas. Inside the walls are slashed everywhere with her strange art; blown-up mathematical equations, genetic coding strips, a mad variety of patterning types, even some sculptures that somehow represent the helical DNA.

  "They say you're a dark horse," she says, as I lay back on the EMR chair so she can take a reading. "Are y
ou sure you want me to expose all your secrets?"

  I smile. "I'd like to see them made into something beautiful."

  She gives me a long, thoughtful look. "I'll do my best."

  We are both mostly business-like. I flirt a little about her hair, she flirts a very little about my build, which I've kept up since my marine days. It is very pleasant and slightly distant, and after the scan she deftly turns down my suggestion of a date to an art museum in the Reach on my way out. I consider it finished.

  Time passes. I occupy my off-hours wandering the city, enjoying the feel of the solid earth under my feet. I like looking up at the towers, imagining how high they might one day grow, perhaps even tall enough to outrace the gathering tides. When I feel low I climb the wall and walk along it too, looking down on the dirty blue Skulks as they pull themselves back up out of the water. By night they buzz with neon arteries like my old alley, trafficked by money and Souls coming in, money and Souls going out.

  Don Zachary's bunker is still there, a foundation stone for the Skulks as ever, and I wonder about that life; to be the only solid thing amidst gossamer threads. Does it make him feel better, superior, like Mr. Ruin?

  Whenever I think about Ruin, I turn my mind to something else. At some point I hear that Carrolla has returned to the Skulks, so I imagine the wild life he is living down there. Maybe he's finally running his bar of subglacic parts. I think back on my old life but I don't hanker for it.

  Three months later Loralena calls, though I never gave her my number. She invites me to see her latest work, saying she's finally finished working my data. It is in her studio, so I go. She meets me at the entrance with the fire of curiosity burning in her eyes.

  "Who are you, Ritry Goligh?" she asks.

  I shrug. "Soul Jacker. Art appreciator. Wall-hiker."

  "And so much more," she says, and leads me through.

  The painting of my mind is bigger than any of the others. It covers the floor and the walls both, so immense are the patterns and the details within it. It is a maze of seven distinct parts, with each part completely different from the others, represented in a different way.

  Seven tones.

  She takes my arm in her own. "I've never seen anything like it. I want to know everything about you."

  Despite myself, I choke up a little. I wait for it to subside before I answer. "Would you care to walk the wall with me?"

  We walk the wall. I talk a little, revealing brief hints of who I was and have been, but each time only in exchange for something from her.

  I learn that she grew up sheltered from the dying years of the war, tucked deep away in an oasis holdout somewhere in the midst of the old neo-Armorica desert belt, far from the suprarene tank routes.

  Her parents had been climatologists, and every day since she was a small girl they'd taken her out to walk the dunes encroaching the tops of old skyscrapers; buried cities that had once been the heart of the world.

  "Imagine this," they always told her, "imagine how it was for them, and how it will be for us in a thousand years."

  They taught her the long perspective of ice ages and extinction-level events, about the tumbling of sand particles in the air as water was sucked out of soil and into the oceans. They asked her to imagine divinity as a circle, not a religion in a book; a circle that goes round and round and never stops remaking itself.

  I love to hear her stories. She loves to hear mine. One night we walk the wall so far we come to the old lighthouse I'd almost jumped from, and I start to cry.

  She takes my chin in her hand, my sadness matched in her own eyes, and says, "Tell me, Ritry. Please."

  So I do. I tell her all of it, in bits and pieces. She weeps for me, at times. She laughs with me. I share it all.

  We sleep together for the first time in that lighthouse, surrounded by the bonds of people who'd dreamed of offering succor to those who were going to die.

  "I want to see it," she says, in the morning that followed. "The place that made you change. At the end of the line."

  I take her there, back to Candyland. It is a little more ruined now, a little more overgrown, though the thick scent of burning sugar from the sweets factory still fills the air. I find the room where I'd faced down Mr. Ruin. It is wrecked in a way I don't remember from before, strewn with bottles. Loralena picks up one and studies the brand; vodka from the subglacic I sank. She picks up another, from the godships.

  She looks at me and nods.

  "I'm so proud of you right now."

  We walk the dried-out riverbeds of the Ragin' River donut loop. We climb the heights of the wooden roller coaster. Sitting huddled together at the top, wrapped up in a blanket borrowed from the ruined hotel, we look back over the dusk falling over the pearly string of Calico cities.

  "I was raped once," she tells me. I listen. She goes on to tell me how, and who it was. A client from her early days as an artist, who thought the passion he felt for her was requited. It wasn't, so he took it. He since fled to the Skulks, and died in the last tsunami.

  I hold her, and she holds me. It is a start, building real roots in that forgotten place.

  The best times of my life follow. I become senior partner at the jack-site. Loralena goes on to publish amazing works, though she never shares the one drawn from my mind with anyone else. Together we fold it up and burn it over a glass of ancient-genome rye.

  "To the future," we toast.

  Our first child comes a year later. We call her Art, after our shared passion. A year later comes a boy, whom we name Memory, Mem for short. We spoil them in everything, and take them everywhere. We walk the wall and made up games for counting all the ships out at sea, we plan elaborate treasure hunts across the length and breadth of Calico to keep them guessing and giggling, we play in the ruins of Candyland building makeshift towers out of chairs and tables. We make a thousand new memories together, with a thousand more to come, and they bring a real depth and meaning to a life I'd always lived for myself. It's something I never thought I wanted, but I love it with a passion fiercer than I've ever felt before.

  Then comes Mr. Ruin.

  "It's him," says Far, pointing at the name in the last line, on the last page. "He's done this to us."

  I know it. I remember how he boasted of the tortures of Napoleon, and I remember the Napoleonic soldiers clustered about the Deathgate.

  "He put them there," Far says, "to lock us in." We all turn to him. I've never heard him speak like this, with this confidence. His teeth are gritted. He looks angry, like a child who could bury three people in his own Soul.

  "He wants the Core," I say.

  "He wants the power," Far says.

  There's no need to explain any further, because I see it now; beyond the Solid Core lies enough power to upend Ritry Goligh's world and enslave every last Soul alive.

  We cannot let that happen.

  A worm's head smashes through the wall and Ray fires all our memories of Mem into it. The worm dissolves like a QC particle has disrupted it, but now we have lost-

  Someone.

  "Arm yourself," I shout as the thunder of galloping worms draws in; the final storm. We muster pieces of the recent past and rip through the wall like one fluid, organic motion, knowing instinctively who will take the lead; Doe, then Ray, then Me, then Far to bring up the rear.

  This is the way it has to be. We race down tunnels leaving explosions in our wake, spending this precious currency we have just gained, losing who we were and what we've done in pursuit of the core directive we wrote for ourselves.

  Save Ritry Goligh.

  RITRY GOLIGH

  15. TREASURE HUNT

  It's a treasure hunt day.

  The clues to the hunt are hidden in Loralena's latest work of art; a number of impossible creatures enfolded within its colors and patterns. There's a porpoise-finned dog and a monkey with tentacle limbs, a clamshell mouse and an elephant-whale.

  We spent a merry evening a week earlier sketching them, while the children were as
leep. In the drawing room of our 50th floor apartment in Calico Reach, drinking good red ice-wine and looking out over the city's pulsing neon lights, we grew increasingly tipsy and our sketches grew more outlandish.

  "Your anemone looks like a football," Loralena teased. "A fat football with a thousand fat legs."

  "It's not even an anemone," I said, a little giddy. "It's a universe in bloom."

  She leaned on my shoulder with her arm around my back, squinting at my artistic effort. I kissed the soft curve of her neck and tasted the faint residue of her perfume; an anniversary gift.

  "What kind of universe blooms in the Arctic?" she asked, nonplussed. "Are you quite mad?"

  I laughed. "You saw my brain. You married me."