Read Against Gravity Online

Authors: Gary Gibson

Against Gravity (9 page)

“How has Mr Gallmon responded to your treatments?”

“I believe this is all detailed in my report.”

“Yes, but I’d like to hear it from you in person.”

“Well, there’ve been some interesting developments. When he first came to me, his augmentations had clearly gone rogue. There were no visible signs yet, none of the characteristic
scarring around the neck and skull, but that was only a matter of time. The treatments have worked in retarding runaway growth.”

“Any ideas concerning these seizures of his?”

“He still reports the same associative hallucinations and I have no idea what’s causing those. If you could tell me if anything similar happened with other Labrats, assuming
you’ve actually tested this stuff out on others apart from Gallmon . . .”

“I can’t disclose that,” Smeby replied.

“Okay, fine,” said Hardenbrooke, looking a little nettled – and also nervous. Smeby had given the medic no warning that he’d be in the country. Maybe Draeger had
suspicions concerning Hardenbrooke’s loyalty. “But there is one other thing.”

Smeby waited.

“I didn’t put this in my report, because it was just a personal feeling, but since you’re here . . . I have the feeling that Gallmon is holding something back, like
there’s something he’s not telling me.”

And there’s something you’re not telling me, either
, Smeby decided.
But there’s enough time for me to find out.

14 October 2096: 1.45 p.m.
Edinburgh

Kendrick hovered outside his flat in Haymarket for over an hour, then took a chance. He headed around to the other side of the block by a circuitous route until he came to
a small side window, now conveniently hidden behind a skip, through which he could crawl.

This led him into an underground car park for the office complex that occupied part of the building above. Next he found the service stairs that led up into his own part of the building.
He’d once scouted it out as an escape route when he’d suspected that he might one day need one.

However, he hadn’t expected to be using it in reverse. Still, there were things upstairs that he needed.

Kendrick hadn’t yet risked returning to the Armoured Saint and he’d already outstayed his welcome at Caroline’s flat. So home it was, at least for long enough to pick up what
he needed and until he could find somewhere else. The flat was tiny, just a rented room and kitchen in a part of the city that had become an American ghetto over several years. But once he got
inside and closed the door behind him, all the stresses and fears of the past few days started piling up on him. He collapsed onto his narrow bed, listening to the silence where his heartbeat had
once been.

After a little while, he closed his eyes.

Kendrick floated in the air and his daughter Sam stood on a grassy plain far below, waving up to him. Beyond her, a kite jiggled in a sudden gust and he watched as she ran after it,
laughing.

At first he didn’t notice the truck. It was painted olive green, its engine humming gently as it clanked across the grass.

“Hey,” he shouted – then again, a little louder. Now he too was standing on the grass, and he started to move towards Sam. He saw his wife there, too, seeming oblivious to
everything but their daughter. Neither of them seemed to get any nearer to him.

The truck rolled to a sudden stop, and uniformed men piled out of it. They grabbed at his wife’s arm, and the thin sound of her scream carried far across the grass.

They had seized his daughter now and she was screaming too, her kite lost, adrift on the wind. Kendrick just ran, untapped reservoirs of energy he never knew he had propelling him. Sam fell to
the ground, the soldiers beating her with the butts of their rifles, the grey metal barrels turning shiny and sticky with splashes of her blood . . .

Kendrick fell out of his bed, his body slick with icy-cold sweat and his throat hoarse. He must have been yelling aloud in his sleep. He staggered out of his bedroom and spotted something by the
front door. It was an envelope, and he picked it up. It hadn’t been there earlier when he’d returned, and he didn’t get much in the way of mail.

He studied the name on the envelope for a long time. His name – his real name, Kendrick Gallmon – was hand-printed on expensive-looking rag paper. Kendrick felt an immediate and deep
sense of foreboding flood through him. He was not registered as the flat’s occupant under his real name, therefore somebody was telling him something. They were saying:
We know who you
are, we know where you live
.

He thought hard. Not the police, not the European Legislate. Sending him expensive-looking mail wasn’t part of their remit. They’d just barge in and get him. So someone else,
then.

Kendrick opened the envelope and found that it contained what appeared to be a simple business card. The letters, printed on textured cream plastic, read
Marlin Smeby
. He didn’t
recognize the name. However, as soon as his fingers touched the card itself an image sprang up uninvited in his mind: an image of a man, seen from the shoulders up, hair thinning across the top of
his scalp, jet black to wavy grey around his ears.

The card slipped from Kendrick’s fingers. He leant down and picked it up again, this time holding on to it more firmly. He decided that he hadn’t hallucinated that image.

The second time around the experience was only mildly unsettling. The face he saw now in his mind’s eye had to be that of Marlin Smeby. Touching the card brought a sensation not unlike a
memory, long buried, suddenly re-emerging, or the spark of recognition someone might feel when a vaguely familiar person passed them in the street – except Kendrick knew that he’d never
met Smeby in his life.

Kendrick focused now on the card’s surface, his augmented senses allowing him to detect the faint filigree of microscopic silver circuitry woven into its surface. The technology was unlike
anything he’d ever come across before, and to place it in a mere business card . . .

It had to have been designed with augmented humans in mind. He felt sure that someone unaugmented, like Malky, would experience nothing on handling it.

So, someone also wanted him to realize that they knew about his past. In this respect the card carried many intimations: of wealth, and of power – certainly the power to expose him.

Kendrick found a local grid address printed on the card’s flip side. He could wait and see what happened next, or he could do something now. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was
somehow connected to what had taken place in the Saint the night before. But, at the very least, if someone had set out to get his attention they’d done so effectively.

Kendrick tapped the grid address into the query screen of the eepsheet stuck onto his refrigerator door with a fridge magnet. It supplied him with the location of the Arlington, a hotel near the
centre of town. Big, expensive-looking place – he’d passed it innumerable times.

The Arlington rested between tall buildings constructed from the same quarried sandstone as the rest of Edinburgh, but unlike the structures in the narrow, crowded streets of
the nearby Old Town this was an edifice entirely of the late twenty-first century. The mirrored surfaces of its windows were visible between broad aluminium interstices jutting out at strange
angles over the street below, giving the whole a malleable, almost plastic appearance. From the opposite side of the street, Kendrick leant back, gazing up at the broad expanses of glass that
reflected anything but the buildings around them. The hotel’s windows were programmed instead to reflect other city skylines – perhaps Milan or Hong Kong. He saw the reflection of a
building impossibly sculpted in the shape of a sickle, as if designed for a world with little or no gravity, and a view totally in opposition to the reality of the staid architecture behind him.
The effect wasn’t very subtle, he decided, and spoke more of money than of taste.

Kendrick stepped across the street towards the hotel’s wide entrance. Now its glass doors displayed a different view, one that cleverly integrated both Kendrick and the people walking past
him into yet another environment . . .

When he stopped and stared at the broad expanse of the main entrance, a chill ran through him as he recognized the landscape displayed. His reflection appeared to be standing on a wide grassy
plain, while behind him the ground curved distinctly up into the distance.

The illusion was well programmed, so that the closer Kendrick came the more he could see. Despite himself, he glanced round at the ordinary street surrounding him as if to check that it was
still there. Then, looking back, he moved his head from side to side, finding he could see a little way further along the plain on either side before the illusion shattered into unfocused rainbow
colours. Curving walls slid off into the far distance before they became shrouded in cloud and mist. It was the same terrain he’d been seeing during his recent seizures.

Feeling shaken, Kendrick passed in through the door. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket and touched the business card that nestled there.

The receptionist smiled and shook her head. “I really don’t know, sir. The building has a range of programmed window environments, but I couldn’t tell you who
programmed any particular one. It’s just not the kind of information we would possess.”

“You don’t know any way I could find out who was contracted to design the current environment?”

The girl wore lipstick like gluey fire, and Kendrick’s augmented vision picked out the fine grain of face powder on her cheeks and her neck, even the fine pattern of capillaries just below
the surface of her skin.

She smiled again. “That’s not exactly the kind of information we’d have to hand.”

He sighed and shook his head. “I’m here to meet a Marlin Smeby. Could you let him know I’m here, please?”

“Mr Gallmon?” said a voice from behind him, and he turned. A woman stood there, dressed in an immaculate suit of night-blue wool, smooth ebony skin stretched over well-trained
muscles. Kendrick recognized her voice, since she had taken his call an hour or so earlier. She looked like the kind of woman who might equally well be an ex-athlete or ex-military – perhaps
even both.

She extended a hand. Her grip was strong, assured. “My name is Candice. If you’re ready, I’ll take you up to Mr Smeby now.”

He glanced down at his own green T-shirt and casual slacks, and shrugged. “Please, after you,” he said.

He reckoned her accent was maybe that of a native New Yorker. Life there was hard these days, and the city had become a neglected and forlorn shadow of its former self. Rumour had it that
snipers still hid out in certain deserted Manhattan office buildings, preying on passers-by.

He followed Candice to the bank of lifts beyond the reception area, admiring the way in which the fabric of her trousers slid across her buttocks as she walked, seeming to reveal more than if
she’d worn nothing. She stepped back, allowing him to enter the open lift first. Its doors slid shut silently, and she touched a floor button. After that they rode upwards in silence for a
while.

Smeby’s . . . bodyguard, secretary, aide, whatever she was finally turned to him. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to the young woman at the
desk.”

Kendrick looked at her, surprised. “You mean about the programmed windows?”

Candice nodded. “Yes, the
Archimedes
. I was up there once. Very hard to forget.”

Kendrick was thunderstruck. “The
Archimedes
? You were on board?”

“Part of a rotating detachment, before the station was abandoned.” The lift started to slow down.

“That must have been quite an experience,” he said carefully.

A smile played at the edge of her lips. “Quite an experience, yes. Doesn’t it make you wonder what’s up there now?”

“I can’t begin to imagine. The whole thing was . . .” He paused, not sure what to say.

“Crazy, I think you were going to say.” Candice smiled, as if to suggest that she didn’t mind.

Of course, Kendrick had realized all along that he must be seeing something like the
Archimedes
during his seizures. But that was all it was – a figment of his imagination.
Something
like
the
Archimedes
, but not bearing any relation to anything real. Just some random environment that his augments had dredged up from his subconscious as they wove
themselves ever more inextricably into the stuff of his brain. Nothing more than that. Yet seeing it there, externalized, as if it had been ripped from the recesses of his mind and reproduced so
precisely, that had been shocking, even frightening.

And it raised the question he’d been asking himself all those long months: why, of all things, would he hallucinate about the
Archimedes
?

The elevator doors opened and Kendrick stepped into a room large enough to house a medium-size conference. A long, low table, set up near the windows, had a variety of computer
equipment scattered across its surface, including some expensive-looking gridcom gear. Smeby himself stood by the wide window, staring absent-mindedly out over the people walking in the street far
below. His arms were folded across his chest, as if hugging himself. He turned and stepped forward when he noticed Kendrick standing there.

Kendrick heard the elevator doors close behind him and turned to see that Candice had left them alone together.

Kendrick held the business card between his thumb and forefinger, where Smeby could easily see it. “You could have just given me a call,” he began.

Smeby laughed, as if appreciating a point well made. “But then you wouldn’t have wanted to satisfy your curiosity by coming here, would you?”

“How did you find me?”

“You
are
Kendrick Gallmon, aren’t you?”

“That depends.”

“Your identity is entirely safe, Mr Gallmon. My employer wishes to speak to you.”

Kendrick stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders; the room felt immediately cold. “I don’t see anyone else around, unless you mean Candice.”

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