The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  You have to be crazy.

  I narrow my eyes and defocus my mind, pulling out of my own Soul and reaching out to navigate the flow between us. Dimly at first, half with my eyes and half with my mind, I glimpse the outline of Mei-An's unique Soul transposed atop her face in a hazy heatmap. Her fears, joys, memories and dreams of a better future light up bright like interweaving passageways in an endlessly overlapping maze.

  I push further out, building an invisible bridge of resonance between us with my force of will alone. Across this bridge I'll pass into the outer reaches of her mind, to the spot where I injected the silvery engram. I can feel that the area's inflamed, as expected with any injection, but that's not all.

  There are gnaw marks at the engram's edge, and a steady creeping corruption setting. That's unusual; too fast, too unlikely, but it can only mean-

  "Shit!"

  Carrolla's shout echoes tinnily through the electrostatic medium, followed by a red flash splashing down like blood in the water. Next I feel it, and I have to tamp down the inclination to panic because this jack just got real.

  The Lag is here.

  The Lag is the brain's natural mental immunity, present in every living mind, its sole purpose to repel any invasive presence. Here in this outer ocean of thought it comes like a goddamn shark, a great metaphysical gray beast ready to savage anything that comes close.

  It's too fast. It sees me and rears back from its feeding ground at the engram before I can hide, coming both barrels right for me and ready to kill.

  "Her cells are starting to cook!" Carrolla calls from far away. "Her whole brain's swelling up. Get out of there, Rit!"

  I can't though, not with the engram still inside her like bloody chum to the Lag. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her Soul away just to get the foreign matter out, and she'll come out deranged. I'm not doing that again.

  "Look at me, Mei-An," I say, gazing into her wide, terrified eyes through the waves even as the extended part of me darts to evade the Lag's massive jaws. I can only do this for moments. "Look into my eyes, that's it."

  She tries to nod but now she's losing motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky.

  "Stay calm," I tell her, "try not to fight," then I crank the wavelength of my thoughts all the way down to match hers, initiating an invasive jack.

  A rush of thought-data pummels me at once; hard bubbles rising through the magnetic flow that represent the inputs and outputs of billions of individual brain cells. I swim roughly against the barrage, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode and now there's only one hope: get to the core.

  A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Arctic Ocean in tsunami as her stress levels spike, the cell firing rate shoots up, and the engram area flips belly up as unconsciousness dawns…

  "Damn it, Rit, she's slipping," Carrolla calls faintly from above.

  I jack deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by organic structures like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away. I pass beyond the confines of brain cells and structure, through the outer crust and into the internal realm where the real world is forgotten and my mind truly meets hers.

  The Molten Core.

  At once lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am most certainly an invader, suspended like a sinking body in a churning magma tide. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.

  I peer through the boiling heat. Nearby the Lag is closing in. This deep in it has transformed into a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows, but I'm also the only thing that can save Mei-An's Soul.

  Everything is to play for now.

  I give the command and my sublavic ship forms around me, the Bathyscaphe, a submersible built for jacking through lava in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with three layers of heat-proof brick cladding. Within its belly my seven crew members burn into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln, and my consciousness splits evenly across them. As captain I send each part of myself to their posts throughout the ship: at the engines, manning the periscope, setting a course for Mei-An's Solid Core.

  The engine-screw churns the ship forward, driving us into bubbles of memory that burst over the periscope and leave behind hints of who this girl is. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive bar beside a guy with a sternum piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon Skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don. One in particular stands out as he punches her in the face, a guy with a blunt nose and blank gray eyes. I know him but can't place the name.

  The Lag snaps after me with ravenous jaws, and I launch a few sacrificial pieces of my own Soul as torpedoes to slake its hunger: the memory of my walk through the park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me, Arcloberry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a hungry worm, after all, and every bit of Soul is good for food.

  My sublavic ship powers ahead with the Lag chasing behind, until in moments I hear the dark boundary line of the Solid Core coming near through sonar, a heartbeat spreading through the magma with a steady-

  thump thump

  thump thump

  -that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering Mei-An's burning mental architecture: the pattern of her mother's pulse.

  The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in the infant brain, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the mind like soft clay. It is the foundation all brains are built upon, with uniquely healing properties, stored in the heart of the Solid Core.

  No one has ever entered a Solid Core and lived. The risks that far inside are massive, where the Lag is god and all the pathways are an endlessly shifting labyrinth. I couldn't get in if I tried, but thankfully I don't need to; I'm close enough now to tap the pulse like a keg.

  Tuning forks punch out through the ship's brick cladding and capture the pattern as it resonates through the magma. The forks melt in seconds but I get what I've come for, then turn the ship around and amplify the pulse outward by vibrating the hull. The Lag instantly quiets under this gentle lullaby from the womb, and I propel my ship away from its huge body with the pulse rippling out around me, bathing Mei-An's mind with this healing balm like a key slotting into a lock.

  It works, and I feel her stress levels calming through the flow of lava. I push my consciousness a few layers deeper, all the way into the realm of my ship's conning tower, into the mind of the captain standing at the periscope. Through the periscope lens I see more thoughts popping ahead; glimpses of her drugged-up latter days in the company of her blunt-nosed boyfriend. I recognize him now, one of the Don's sons who comes around sometimes to take his father's tax. He's an abusive shit who methodically beats the will out of her. The memories are calmer now, as the panic of the Lag's immune rejection stills.

  thump thump, thump thump

  The Lag is still out there though, tracking me sleepily through the lava. I'm still an invader, and the job isn't over. If I don't do something it will eventually scrub the engram, so I head to the tail end of the optic nerve and massage the pulse around the engram's edge, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. The pulse cools the inflamed cells and pets the Lag on the head like a trusty old dog.

  I sigh with metaphoric relief.

  "Can I have my Arcloberry juice box back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the magma. I remember the memory exists because I only gave the emotional content, not the frame, but the Lag is mute on its refund policy.

  "My walk through the
park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."

  It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more than this in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?

  Dammit. I pull outward, and my mind and the sublavic ship merge back into one as my thoughts suck free of Mei-An's Molten Core. I rush back through the bubbling outer soup of data as my consciousness disengages, until I'm fully back in my own head and panting hard, lying in the decelerating thump thump of the EMR machine.

  Mei-An is lying in front of me, her eyes now closed and breathing deeply. The job is done.

  2. MEI-AN

  The tray engages and we slide out of the hollow EMR machine together, into the plain gray of the jack-room. It's painted gray for just this moment, to avoid any confusing stimulus to a disoriented brain.

  "Strong work, Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.

  It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.

  I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.

  "Fine work, really excellent," he says, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"

  I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray and sit up with my back to Mei-An. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.

  "Not bad," I say. My tongue feels as thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me sip it. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"

  He frowns. "You sacrificed the juice? Dammit, Rit. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"

  "It came to mind."

  He laughs. "I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the Skulk-end, some new seed-blend. We'll hit it later. Now let's get you to recovery."

  He helps me up and together we hobble out of the gray jack-room and down the polished corridor, to the glass-walled outlook space at the building's edge. Here there's a massage chair with a cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Arctic waves off the edge of our floating Skulk.

  I settle in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Arctic spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice.

  "Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, guiding my head into the sonic bath-well in the chair's head. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "You'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."

  I snort, but already I'm fading as the sonic bath takes hold with a pattern of its own, attempting to mimic the sound of my mother's pulse and put me into the same womb-like state I used for Mei-An.

  It's a poor imitation for most, but works well for me, since I never had a mother and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an artificial machine womb. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the re-structuring of their Soul, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. I drift off thinking of the War, and the few good times I can still remember.

  I rouse hours later with Carrolla's steady hand on my shoulder, odd memories flitting up from the remnants of the bath; who I am and what I've done.

  "You're up for it?" he asks, as he lowers the thrum of the sonic bath. "We can always dose her a bit longer if you need more time."

  I blink, looking out of the window to the dark water. Still night.

  "I'll do it," I say, patting Carrolla's hand. "Give me a minute."

  "No problem. She's in recovery."

  His footsteps clank away, and I'm left looking out of the glass again, waiting as my mind gets itself together. It's all darkness beyond, waves lapping against the Skulk's quays, but for a few buoy lights on the kelp-farms and the faint lights of ships out in the distance. All so fragile and tenuous, like newly grown strands of coral.

  I get up.

  Mei-An is waiting for me in the recovery room, overlooking another open swathe of gray ocean. She smiles when I come in.

  "Alsh bevral I ferraqu," she says. "Kalin Very."

  I nod, because she's speaking Afri-Jarvanese, one of the languages in the engram I injected. "Very good. Do you know what it means?"

  "Not really. Just a feeling."

  "You said good morning and wished me well. I suppose it'll be morning soon enough."

  She brushes a strand of dark hair from her face. For a long moment she looks at me, sizing me up and down. It's not an unfamiliar sensation, and not entirely uncomfortable. Soul Jackers have always used sex as a balm; the fastest, safest way to bed in an engram. Back in the War, working with men and women who'd constantly needed the trauma of close-quarters combat excised, I hardly breathed between jacks and the rush of sex that followed.

  "Carrolla said it'll make me feel better," she says at last.

  "How do you feel now?"

  "Bad. Nauseous. Like I'm not myself."

  "Then it will," I say. "Or we can sit here and talk through the night, holding hands. Both will do the same."

  "I don't want to talk. I don't have the time. But you don't mind?"

  "It's my job." I smile, which always helps.

  She raises an eyebrow, clipped like a silkworm, and walks over to me. Each step is measured, a careful gait she surely learned at one of Calico's schools of manners. She's plainly from the Calico Reach, the uppermost crust of the wealthy across the tsunami wall.

  "I remember what you did," she says, taking my hand. "In the War."

  Her hand is soft, small like all the Reach girls, modified to be that way. I know now why she first came out here to the Skulks; seeking adventure. She's a tourist who got pulled down into the mire, and now she wants to be free. Of course she knows something about me too, some piece of my marine life glimpsed through the EMR. This is why the post-jack physical contact is so important; to add context to knowledge that would otherwise be corrosively unsupported, helping the memory engram sprout roots in her Soul.

  "Don't think about that," I say. "Come on, let's go."

  Hand in hand we exit the jack-site. Carrolla gives us a nod from the reception.

  Outside, the air is thick with salt and rot from the off-Skulk kelp farms. Stars glimmer faintly through Calico's polluted glow. A desultory alley winds down to a nondescript dock on the left, flocked with nesting crulls, genetic half-breed of gulls and crows, and a shark-tiller's coracle. The dirty gray Arctic Ocean laps steadily at the dock's barnacle-crusted plastic flotation barrels, as dark and rhythmic as sex.

  On the right the alley leads up to the tsunami wall through a gauntlet of cheap pink and purple neon, signs glowing off the Skulk's three B's; brothels, bars, and barrios. Each is lit in their own lurid fuzz, like a row of hungry divas lusting for applause.

  Mei-An looks at me. I know she's used to finer things; life inside Don Zachary's compound, and before that Calico itself. "How can you live here?" she asks.

  "How could you?" I answer.

  In places the neon is interrupted by dark gulches of shadow, lean-to escarpments and scaffolded construction projects, squat boat-holds and opium dens built out of rotten-hulled boats, much of it flotsam salvaged from the last tsunami. My jack-site doesn't look out of place here, about as equally squalid and dingy as the rest. It even has its own neon sign, chosen by Carrolla, though it's gray like brain matter and only says 'Souls Jacked!' I'm not sure if that's a joke or not, but it seems to amuse him.

  With her small hot hand in mine, we head up the alley. Underfoot the Skulk fabric shifts, as the flotation barrels it rests upon flex with our weight. Ahead of us, rising above the crock-pot chimneys and uneven lines of the Skulk, stands the implacable off-white shank of
Calico's tsunami wall.

  It's vast, of course, as big as any dam in the pre-War days, enough to stop the fifty-foot tsunamis that churn up from quakes in the Arctic fault lines. It's been over ten years since the last big one, and we've been due another for as long as I've been here.

  We're all living on borrowed time.

  "You don't belong here," says Mei-An, catching me looking up at it. "You belong on the other side, in Calico. You paid your dues in the War."

  "I paid enough to stay wherever I want."

  She doesn't say any more, and I'm glad of it. I wouldn't want to fall out over this, not when the job is still unfinished, nor do I want to learn any more of her life with the Don's son. I have enough life histories weighing me down already.

  The massage boys, whores and touts leave us alone as we pass by their neon dens, each a cave to forbidden pleasure. Some give me a wink. These are the people I drink with most nights, after the Mei-Ans are long gone to whatever life my engrams build for them.

  "You must like it here," she says, as we turn off the alley and into one of the blue tarp parks. The resident homeless man, once a marine I think, shouts out something as we pass by. A few stunted trees reach upward toward neon from soil-pods dropped amongst the barrels, branching like brain cells. I imagine messages passing between their roots, electronic charges popping on-off, on-off, as the trees build the seeds that will outlive them by far. We skirt the sunken pond, where rainwater trapped in the blue plastic sheeting sags, and I wonder how I can best stem her curiosity in the fewest words.

  "You know about the Lag," I say.

  She nods by my side, clutching my arm more tightly now. I don't blame her, it's dark here in the Skulk-slums where the sex workers and ex-bountymen go to burrow in and ride out the daylight like vampiric worms under a rock.

  "The thing in your brain that protects you by eating invaders. You know sometimes the Lag turns on itself, on its own home? People get old and they forget; it means the Lag got old too, it couldn't recognize the things it was supposed to protect. You end up with large empty expanses of memory, blank canvases where nothing more lasting can take root than what you had for dinner that night."