The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  It was a suburb; a road layered with sand and spidered with cracks where tough tufts of weed rose through the dirty concrete like lines of beige magma. The low buildings here were shabby, disheveled, abandoned for so long and wearing their coats of dust like old hobos, layer upon layer. She walked over to a bookshop and touched her finger to the glass, drawing a simple message in the grime of years.

  Anna & Ravi 4eva

  Pressing her face to the glass, she looked through the grit to an interior that had gone untouched for fourteen years. Bookshelves stood in higgledy, leaning ranks, like drunks propping each other up on the way home. The wall behind the cash desk was plastered with pictures of people; famous authors, perhaps, scrawled with Arabic signatures. She didn't recognize any of them. This was just another world she'd never known.

  A frozen floater lay on the floor by the door.

  Anna squatted on the hot sidewalk, peering in at its wasted peanut face, the white eyes forever locked in an open position. This too was a person. She couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, young or old. For fourteen years this soul had beaten at this door, looking for escape, and nobody had come to help.

  "I'm here now," Anna whispered.

  Of course she knew it was a lie, just another in a long procession she'd told to reach this point. Destruction was her specialty, not creation, and so too would this be a kind of destruction. Once upon a time she'd had the luxury of freeing the ocean and guiding them to the coast, but she'd long since grown out of that. Every person was a tool to her now, a weapon to be used.

  She jumped and landed only inches away, across the glass and inside the dry heat of the bookshop, stippled with gritty shadows cast through the window, washed in the smell of slowly baking books. She laid her hand on the floater's head and listened to the glacial processes ticking away inside.

  A grandmother.

  She'd been waiting for her granddaughter to come pick up a new storybook, something fresh out of Ankara. All the memories were there still, though gummed together in a soggy ball. Anna knew that if she asked, this frail trace of the woman would resist. She wouldn't want to be a warrior. She wouldn't want to die for a cause she didn't understand.

  So Anna didn't ask.

  She filled the woman's mind with memories of her granddaughter. She was in danger. She needed to be protected. Then she flicked a new switch inside, and the woman's pale eyes sputtered to light. Her body shifted. She rose to her feet.

  "I'm sorry," Anna said, then wrenched the line.

  If the woman could have screamed, she would have. The transformation was sudden, irreversible and violent, as the T4 wrought destructive patterns throughout her like a key turning in a lock. Taut gray skin turned black, white strips peeled away like hanging bandages, and a staticky fog fumed out as her telomeres became radioactive sand clocks ticking down to some inevitable eruption.

  A leper. She flickered and fritzed like an electric spark, her mind bobbing on the raw vibration of the line.

  Anna surveyed the work. It was good. It was only the beginning.

  She reached out and felt for all the dull, flat pebbles of quieted floaters around her. There were hundreds of them, thousands, spread throughout Istanbul. Every office, every bedroom, every basement apartment held them. In churches and mosques alike they lay, in spaces that had served as their prisons ever since the first call went out on the line. They hadn't been able to respond then, hadn't been able to throw their bodies on the piles of the demons far to the east, hadn't been able to fulfill their purpose and had instead languished in solitary captivity.

  Now they would rise.

  Anna jumped to them in a blur; through dark bedrooms, echoey halls, silent conference centers carpeted with the dead, in prisons, schools, shopping malls, bars and restaurants. To each she gave a touch like she was handing down a holy blessing, and brought them back, and used their memories against them, and added them to her army.

  Hundreds soon jumped at her back. Thousands.

  Once in New York she'd freed the ocean locked in Yankee Stadium, and led them away to their fate. This was the same. It was worse. It was necessary.

  Hours ticked by, marked by the steady stitch of angels falling toward her, metronomic meteors arcing across the sky.

  One last jump, and she stood beside the Blue Mosque on the Golden Horn, in front of the pools where she and Ravi had last been together, before the world changed. The water had mostly evaporated away, but their two boats still remained, on their sides where they'd left them. Their hulls nestled close together; her racer catamaran and Ravi's souped-up Powerboat. He'd lost the race and pulled her into the water. They'd kissed, and it had just been another kiss, on just another day, except none of that was really true.

  It had been the last kiss. There would never come another, not like that. Beyond that moment lay only hurt and sadness. At the end of the line Ravi lay bleeding in a cornfield. Now his DNA hummed within her, and that was the closest they'd get to having a child together.

  She looked at the boats. Her army of lepers shivered and flashed behind her.

  "Goodbye," she said, for the last time, not just to Ravi but to a dream of a life she wouldn't now lead. Then she turned to her army and gave them her orders. The angels were almost there.

  She jumped to meet them.

  INTERLUDE 6

  The voices spoke louder than ever.

  It had been many years since they'd ruled him. In those early days after the Lazarus pull, torn from moment to moment like a soul splintered through a twisting kaleidoscope, it had been chaos. Clinging to any one moment of reality; to words, to visions, to facts or a clear concept of time, had been impossible.

  Olan Harrison had glided through the world in a new body that hadn't felt like his own. Little Olan had spoken in his ear. He was guided by the artificial intelligence of his own self, and in time that guidance had come to drown out the rest of the voices.

  But they were never truly gone. He rarely slept, because they spoke loudest in his dreams. At night he felt the severed ends of himself reaching up like banshees, calling for their constituent parts lost upon the line.

  Standing now in his suite at the top of the Redoubt, moments after Rachel Heron had left with her battalion of angels, he shuddered at the fresh profusion of voices in his mind, proliferating after his battle with the Last Mayor

  They were not his own.

  He'd never known who they belonged to. Many of them were in a constant state of agony. Many were perpetually lost, panicked, afraid, alone. He'd been one with them for the longest time, barely kept afloat by the fractured spine of Little Olan, cobbled together from impressions like a badly stacked communications network.

  He'd come to think of the line like a satellite array, with the voices as stray signals broadcasting foreign messages into his mind. Little Olan had seen it and offered prescriptions. Through long, meditative training he had coaxed the pieces of the real Olan Harrison to the center, bringing if not peace, then a kind of stability. The things done to him while he'd floated on the line for a year were nightmares, so he did everything he could to sever them from himself. For a time after returning to the Redoubt, that meant cutting pieces of himself away, those that were too tightly intertwined with the voices to separate, but that in turn had led to clarity.

  He was still Olan Harrison, but sleeker, like a shark. There was little room for emotion. He rarely laughed, rarely enjoyed himself except in the exercise of power. Severing the revolution at the root had given him the most overwhelming rush of well-being. To reduce others to helplessness made his own suffering infinitely more bearable.

  It became a habit, and a crutch.

  Punishment worked, and across the years his powers only grew. The voices whispered secrets and he listened, allowing them their time in the light in return. They taught him how to control others, how to jump across vast distances, how to project force out of nothing, and they taught him the one truth that mattered above all others.

  He cou
ldn't leave the Redoubt.

  He'd tried it once, a jump outside the shield, and he'd almost died. Away from his people in the Redoubt, his mind had cracked back into pieces. Without their salving presence around him, reflecting back the core Olan Harrison he'd chosen to be, he was flung back into a tumultuous cauldron of voices.

  He'd raved. He'd cut gouges into his thigh with his fingernails. Rachel Heron found him banging his head against the shoulder of a type one in the body hills, and jumped with him back to the Redoubt.

  For the failing of seeing him so weak, he'd determined to one day Lazarus her too, so she would know how it felt. Yet since then he'd only grown more dependent on her. Using her mind as a substitute for his own made his days pass by simply. Her voice was consistent. She, alone, seemed to be a real person, and sending her up and bringing her back down would ruin that.

  The rest of them were ants doing just as he said, with no will of their own. He used them like a man drank water. Only Rachel Heron saw him, knew him, and that helped. Tomorrow, he told himself with every passing day. One more day, and she'll be gone.

  Standing at the glass, he ran his fingers over the scabbed wound in his throat. If anything, the pain helped to center him. He'd passed through phases where he'd punctuated his meditation with self-flagellation. He'd brought the ants in to administer punishments to him. The skin of his new, perfect body was graced with a thousand marks of torture, from burns, breaks, and lash marks to excisions of skin, tiny implanted needles that pricked with every movement, extreme body modification and mutilation.

  It all helped.

  There were no other drives. Whatever he'd cut out of himself had left only this; power and pain.

  Finally snaring James While had been a panacea. To look into that man's eyes and see the same agony ticking away inside him, the same fragmentation, had given him strength. To know that James While was finally locked away without a voice, without any means to escape his captivity, had given him a kind of joy.

  And losing him? He'd feigned ignorance for Rachel Heron, but there was nothing he didn't see. He'd felt James While slip away under her touch, and accepted it. Her mission now was an essential one. And there were always costs.

  It came down to what was right. He'd been many things in his time; a billionaire businessman, an innovative philanthropist, but in truth he'd always tried to do what was right. He'd wanted to help humankind, to be good.

  Perhaps he was still good. There were always costs. It had taken the colonization, enslavement, and ultimate destruction of millions of native peoples around the world to build the modern world he'd come to straddle. Eggs were always broken. The omelet was worth it.

  Now he moved about his lush space calmly, fetching a fresh shirt, fresh slacks. Before a full-length mirror he looked at his body. Every scar, every distending of his flesh, every mark rooted him in this time and place. He traced his fingers over them and shivered.

  This was the new Olan Harrison. The voices were nothing.

  He pushed them down.

  He washed the wound in his neck. Already the edges had sutured together. Accelerated healing had been at the top of his list thirty years earlier, when he'd wanted only to build a more sickness-resistant human species from the genetics up: Homo Dominus, Man the Master.

  He'd succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He'd ended the world before it could end itself, and in the ashes he'd planted a seed that might survive. How could they denigrate him still?

  He smiled, as he remembered the things the Last Mayor had called him. He shrugged on the shirt. There was nothing to fear there. Parlor tricks. Arrogance in a past version of himself, that was what Rachel had once said. He cut those past versions away, and what was left? Pure, distilled Olan. The process of pruning was always ongoing. Every setback was a chance to improve what he was.

  And he was beyond Homo Dominus now. He was Homo Deus, Man the God. Who rivaled him in power? As a God, it wasn't surprising that he needed his followers around him. Gods needed praise, and soon he would get all the reflected praise he needed from one man, one incredible engine of power.

  The Last Mayor.

  It was only a matter of time. Soon they would flow together in a terrible wave across the world, severing, enslaving, until every person in every part belonged to him, and lived only to reflect his glory back.

  There would be no limits anymore. At last he would be whole again, and every one of his tormentors on the line would be dragged back to Earth, where he could punish them for all the ways they'd punished him.

  It was a good thing, really. There had to be order; that was one thing the humanitarians never understood. Man could never be kind because man was simply not kind. Systems had to be built to constrain him, and Olan Harrison understood systems better than anyone alive. Everything had been planned.

  He smiled, looking out at the mountains and doing up the last few buttons of his shirt. The Last Mayor knew nothing. Olan's power could not be questioned.

  He would go to him one final time. It would be worth it to see the fear grow in the man's eyes. There was nothing better than that for giving him relief, as the wicked saw their punishment coming nigh.

  He brushed his hair. He tucked in his shirt. He squeezed all his slaves on the line, and sucked in the strength as their breath failed them for five seconds, ten. Then he jumped back to the wall.

  18. STONEHENGE

  After I lurch out of the crushing rain of the wall, I collapse on the body hills and gasp for a while.

  Good God.

  While the migraine fights with the black eye inside my mind, I try to sort through everything I learned about Olan Harrison in those few startling moments when I plunged the black eye into his throat.

  It scares even me.

  He's barely human. He is what I was when I beat down Arnst and humiliated Feargal, when I watched Keeshom and the others die and didn't care; but he is fractured into a thousand more pieces. He is voices screaming in the darkness for help.

  I had Drake in my mind and it drove me insane. There are no excuses for what I did, I see that now; only reasons. I had my darker and my better angels, steering me on, but Olan Harrison doesn't have those angels, he is them. He is a jeering mob whipped into shape by the memory of a memory. He's a chimera. He's more like a non-player character fresh out of the Yangtze Darkness, repeating lines as they're spooned in from Internet feeds, building a sense of self through a constant process of whittling the 'weaker' parts of himself away, leaving only pure diamond power and a parade of terrible victories behind.

  I recall the worst of those victories, his 'severing' of everyone in his Redoubt. I see his immense power and wonder, can I possibly beat that?

  The sky is gray and heavy. The air smells of summer dust. Perhaps it'll rain; a storm out here on the body steppes. How much time remains? I feel cogs clanking into position for the end, with me and Olan at the center.

  On my feet, I survey my army. Quite a lot of them are broken. He sent diamond lances out that tore them to bits. Plenty lie torn and twitching around the hills. Perhaps I was lucky to survive.

  The migraine settles to a twinge. I reach out and collect my army's knowledge about the extent of the invisible shield. They didn't find a weak point, it seems, but they did find opportunities. There are places behind certain hills, close to the wall, with no easy line of sight. Places they can dig into the gray bodies and not be observed.

  I start walking over the uneven gray ground toward the nearest of them, and my army follow. They are limping demons with their feet torn off, lepers flickering in and out of existence like dying neon lights, bisected floaters pulling themselves around by their arms. This is my army of slaves, I think. Olan has his too, severed to his will. Are we really that different?

  The new camp I select is much like our old one. The wall hums nearby. The hills rise. There is a clearing, and it is there I decide to build my final work. A symbol for the ages, and for any eyes looking out from Olan's Redoubt, wondering what kind of pl
ot the madman is hatching.

  I build Stonehenge.

  It's a whim. I've always wanted to build it in one of my cairns, but never had the time.

  My ocean dig into the body hills, extracting building materials as if it was Deepcraft, obscuring the tunnels that burrow down toward the bedrock below. Here a frozen gray arm unhooks from a waist, there a knee uncurls from a neck. These are pixels of stone, each a pointillist dab in the 3D portrait I'm building.

  In the clearing I lay the foundations; twenty-four 'dolmen' posts, each four bodies wide, newly interwoven. I have my demons stack them ten bodies high, forming gray pillars like the stones erected thousands of years ago, atop which they construct 'lintels' of dead floaters slotted together like Lego.

  I feel eyes on me. I grin for those watching from the Redoubt. At the same time, my army are deep into the hills now already, digging where they can't be seen. I send lepers jumping forward into the solid rock bodies, where they erupt like TNT blasts, making progress swift for the demons that follow. I lose lepers, but it's fast.

  Shortly after they hit bedrock there's a surge on the line, and I turn to see Olan Harrison returned. He's standing inside the wall where I can't reach him, dressed in a clean shirt, looking at me with something like a smile.

  "I thought we might talk," he says.

  I walk over to him. This is good. Every second with his attention on me is a second my teams keep digging, looking for the base of the wall.

  "So talk."

  19. TALK

  He studies me. We know each other now, so I know he's been plotting too. I felt the army leave the Redoubt hours ago, flinging themselves like lepers through the line, headed west.

  What's west? Anna. Istanbul. All the shields she's been standing up feel like distant braziers on the long dark night of the line. There's going to be a battle, and I don't know who will win.