Hammerjack (22 page)

Wanting had nothing to do with it. Cray felt himself falling apart. He looked down at his hands as the skin of his fingers began stripping away, exposing the bones underneath. Shadow pain started to spread through the rest of his body, a wave that followed his cells as they turned to ashes.

Lyssa floated, her smile urging the process on.

What’s happening to me?

He didn’t speak the words. He no longer had a voice. But she was there, in his thoughts, feeding them and driving them—directly toward
her
.

“I enjoyed our conversation, but there comes a time when the talk must end,” Lyssa said, an approximation of seduction in her voice—but beneath, cold, relentless domination. “I want you to understand, but that purpose is secondary.”

Lyssa shed her clothing, a human woman in form only—then that form dissolved, down to atoms, down to protons, turning in phase until they reached out for him. Passing beyond the glass, she enveloped Cray’s shell of a body, bypassing his flesh and flooding his mind.

It was excruciating, but Cray liked it. God help him, he
liked
it.

“I need to consummate,” she said.

Cray screamed and surrendered.

Hands, somewhere out of the world.

And voices, penetrating his skull.

They beat against him savagely, breaking the connection between him and Lyssa. The interrupt in the flow between them was staggering, a threat to his sanity as he tried to claw his way back to her light. But Lyssa only shrieked in pain and amazement, unable to stop Cray from being dragged away.

Then the darkness fell, and with it came the return of reality.

It was like coming off a run in the Axis with no transition time, a sudden shift in perception that reconnected flesh with consciousness—and stirred an utter hatred of organic life, with all the limitations it imposed. Cray came back, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to accept how he had been cheated. He pounded his fists against his chest, trying to hurt himself. He detested what he had become.

Again.

More hands restrained him, pinning him to the floor of the bionucleics lab. Four CSS soldiers had dragged him out of the Tank and were looking down on him like he carried the plague. Terrified, they managed to hold him in place until the worst of the convulsions passed. It wasn’t for loss of will, because Cray still wanted to fight. It was just his exhausted body, which had spent every last corpuscle of energy.

“Just let me go,” he whimpered.

Avalon slid into his view, regarding him with a strange pity. She was clearly in pain and half-blind, still under assault by the waves of energy Lyssa projected.

“Why?” Cray asked her.

Avalon motioned to the soldiers.

“Get him out of here,” she ordered.

Cray was up in the tower apex when Avalon came looking for him. Beneath the pyramid ceiling, her footsteps rode the echo of her arrival, her shadow moving through dim light. Tall and distorted, it fell across him like a tangible presence—as if it had a life of its own.

“I thought you cut out on me,” Cray said without looking at her. His eyes stayed on the virtual display that hovered over the control bank in front of him, the same as he had done for the last ten hours. Avalon had left him alone the entire time, perhaps waiting for darkness to gather before she made an appearance.

“Keeping myself busy,” she said, leaning against the edge of the bank. With a flick of her hand, she produced Cray’s MFI and held it out for him. “I believe this belongs to you.”

“Thanks.” He put the device away. After an uncertain pause, he added, “I’m sorry for cracking up back there.”

The free agent reached out, tentatively at first, but finally landed a hand on Cray’s shoulder. The touch was awkward and inexperienced—alien comfort, but offered freely. “Don’t worry about it,” Avalon said, approaching compassion but not quite making it. “The capabilities of that machine are beyond comprehension.”

“No, they’re not.” Cray was blank, recalling the experience while blocking it out at the same time. “Part of me knew what she would do before I went in there. The worst part is that on some level, I
wanted
it to happen.” His words trailed off, while he rubbed his eyes, then turned back toward her. “How did you know?”

“My sensors picked up on her emissions,” Avalon explained. “They were off the scale. I played a hunch that you were in trouble.”

“Nothing wrong with your instincts.” He managed a smile. “Thanks.”

Avalon hesitated, as if she wanted to say more. Cray was curious, and leaned in a little closer. He could sense her eagerness, while she sensed his interest in her turn. As soon as that happened, the moment was over. Avalon retreated again.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, and changed the subject. She motioned toward the display. “So what have you got there?”

“Postincident telemetry logs,” he said. “I downloaded a complete set from the bionucleics lab and transferred them up here.”

“They telling you much?”

“Not a goddamned thing.” Cray sighed tiredly. “But there’s still a lot of territory to cover. The answer is buried in here somewhere. I just need to know where to look.”

Avalon watched the series of numerics, graphs, and code as they trickled through the ether. Cray watched the images, mirrored in the lenses that sheathed her ruined eyes.

“It’s a comparative encephalograph,” Cray said. “I’m tracking bionucleic output changes over the entire life of the unit—trying to find some indication of when Lyssa jumped off the reality rail.” He shrugged. “So far, everything clicks. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a conscious event.”

Avalon stirred, a subtle crossover into uncertainty.

“I can still feel her, you know,” she said. “Coming on with the push, even with all that distance between us. Keeping an eye on me.”

“It’s nothing personal. She just doesn’t like to share.”

“You strike up a relationship with her?”

“Not precisely,” Cray told her, switching off the display. “More like she wanted to establish a relationship with
me
—or that she already fabricated one before I arrived.”

“How did she even know about you?”

“By tracking my signature through the Axis.”

“I thought Lyssa was an isolated system.”

“She is,” Cray said. “And if there
had
been a breach, there would be evidence of a proprietary feedback trace. But the logs don’t show anything like that—even though she told me there was an outside influence at work here.”

“Maybe she’s lying.”

“I don’t think so.” He sounded vacant, even to himself. “She flirted with the truth. But she’s afraid. She needs my trust to get what she wants. Lying to me would pose too great a risk.”

“Why?”

“Because she wants me to interface.”

Avalon was at a loss. She quickly recovered and bored into him, betraying a subtext of urgency to her question.

“Did you?”

“No,” Cray answered—not addressing her brush with panic but taking an interest in it nonetheless. “Her engineers designed the interface protocols before they realized how voracious her appetite for data really is. Without some serious ice for protection, Lyssa would soak up a human cerebral cortex like a sponge.”

“You mean this
thing
can absorb a human mind?”

“Or worse,” Cray added. “Brain death would be the least of your worries.”

The warning was graphic, but came off as feeble. Cray buried his only caveat, the thing he dared not mention—that he had been tempted. In spite of the risks, in violation of his own convictions, he had been tempted.

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “Maybe she
is
crazy, and all this is just delaying the inevitable. But there was something underneath it all—like the kind of truth you find in a dream, you know? The thing you always knew was there but could never see.”

Cray got out of his chair, putting distance between himself and Avalon. He stopped at a bank of windows, watching the metropolitan night unfold before him. The lights, the towers—everything reminded him of Kuala Lumpur, which made him think of Zoe.

“Lyssa mentioned something called the Other.”

“What does that mean?” Avalon asked.

Cray turned back toward her. Shadow obscured her face, fine points of reflected fire marking her eyes.

“I’m not sure,” Cray answered, allowing his thoughts to wander back to that cryptic statement she had made, trying to relate to him in terms his limited intellect would understand:
All that time you spent in the Axis,
she said,
tell me if you never sensed there was something more
. It was only when he saw Avalon staring at him that he realized he had repeated Lyssa’s words out loud, making them into his own.

“It’s a hammerjack legend,” he explained. “Complex networks forming their own neural pathways, achieving spontaneous intelligence in the Axis. Racial memories trapped in a translogic dimension. Just ghost stories.”

Avalon looked away. The points of light disappeared, as if she had turned them off. So much of her being was synthetic, it was possible she didn’t want to hear about such things.

“Sounds like a street religion,” she said, her disdain covering something more ominous.

“People seek faith in familiar places,” Cray suggested. “I can see the reason for it. You spend enough time adrift between the logic streams, you get to feeling that something really
is
out there—something that knows you and remembers you . . . and keeps a piece of you every time you go in.”

Avalon regarded him curiously. “That’s why you don’t interface,” she observed. “You don’t want to lose yourself in there.”

Cray smiled. A moment of understanding passed between them.

“What’s left of me, in any case.”

His words provoked a reaction in her—a glimmer of sympathy, perhaps, before her defenses engaged and she became even more distant than before. If Cray hadn’t known better, he would have sworn Avalon felt conflicted.

“What does this have to do with ‘the Other’?” she asked.

“Who knows?” Cray shrugged, not really certain of it himself. “Maybe Lyssa is just searching for meaning—trying to find God in the Axis, the same way hammerjacks do. Finding this Other is probably her way of believing that she isn’t alone in the universe.”

“And she played on your superstitions to make you believe it as well.”

“No. Hammerjacks say translogic space is populated by fragments of human thought, trapped in the Axis after each interface. Lyssa created the Other in her own image.”

Avalon tried to be dismissive, but couldn’t seem to find the will. Cray knew the free agent could have killed him in a single stroke—but in that moment, for the first time, he could see a weakness. A fear that perhaps she and Lyssa had something in common.

“She’s afraid she doesn’t have a soul,” Avalon said.

“Something like that,” Cray agreed. “The Other might be a manifestation of her desire to find meaning—a force like her, but greater, existing outside the realm of the Axis.”

“Is that even possible?” Avalon seemed to hang hope on his reply.

“It’s doubtful,” Cray said. “But real or imagined, it’s the source of her problems. Thus her desire to interface with a human being. If she can absorb what she doesn’t already have—call it a soul, call it whatever you want—she can get what she needs to reach out to the Other.”

“What do you think?”

It was an uncommonly frank question coming from her, infused with uncharacteristic emotion. Cray had no doubt—the whole thing had her spooked, or at the very least touched something deep and relevant.

Cray decided to duck the issue for the time being. “I won’t know anything until I have a look at her logs,” he said.

Unsatisfied with his reply, Avalon took a step toward him. She hesitated to come any closer, as if something important depended on getting the correct answer. Cray found himself anxious to hear what else she had to say, but then he heard the signal from the free agent’s minicom. The tiny device beeped, abruptly ending their conversation. She lifted a gloved hand to her lips to answer it.

“Go ahead,” she said.