Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Ross and Jennifer were back on Graxis when the response to his communication request came through from the outside. He was
on a mission to redeem a promise, as far as that was possible, and thus was searching for Bob the accountant against the familiar
backdrop of eternally invading marines and their indefatigably repelling foes.
‘I need to give him the big talk,’ he had told Jennifer. ‘I promised I’d get him back to his family, and I can’t deliver on
that.’
‘His family might be out there,’ she replied. ‘Just not as he remembered them. Once he crosses into the Secondverse, there
are ways of making contact.’
‘Yeah, all I can do is bring him to the gateway. I can’t promise what he’ll find when he steps through it.’
‘He’ll find the same thing we all do,’ she replied. ‘Hell if you make it. Heaven if you want it to be.’
The incoming transmission took the form of an avatar. It was a perfectly solid-looking holographic object but it could not
interact with the environment: it was just a projection, a high-spec video call, its images relaying real-time 3D laser scanning.
He found it a disturbing sight, but it was always going to be. Even if he hadn’t aged a day, it would have been unsettling
to see a person who was recognisably himself and yet someone else. He had aged more than a day, though. This was what Ross
Baker actually looked like right then in the outside world, but it wasn’t merely the fact that this was a hologram that meant
he appeared more artificial than anybody here on the inside. Jennifer had said he now lived in California but she hadn’t mentioned
he had gone quite so native. That looked like a lot of surgery.
The avatar said nothing, just stood there. He seemed apprehensive and apologetic, the way Ross knew he always did when he
was in the wrong and ready to take his lumps.
‘You’re looking well,’ Ross told him, a precisely measured level of sarcasm in his voice.
He acknowledged it with a nod.
‘This is just the cosmetic,’ the avatar said, his mid-Atlantic accent making Ross cringe. ‘There’s far more been replaced
beneath the derma. In fact, you could say that neither of our minds still inhabits the body it used to.’
‘Yours still inhabits the real world,’ he said accusingly.
‘Maybe not for too much longer. Compared to you anyway. I’m envious. You’ll never age, never get sick. I gave you that much,
at least.’
‘
Gave
me …? You took away
everything
: everyone I loved, everything I had and everything I was ever going to have.’
‘They say when you’ve done something wrong, the hardest part is to forgive yourself. I realise that’s going to be a particularly
big ask in this case. I know what I took from you. I know what was taken from everybody – that’s what’s driven my campaigning
for DC rights. But that’s also why I had to do what I did. You were the best chance we had of saving everyone in there from
Michaels.’
‘And did you think this bought you absolution, is that it?’
‘There is no absolution. It’s the resurrectionist’s price: the same Faustian pact the anatomists entered when they started
robbing graves to get their specimens. When you enter that pact, you know you’ll be paying the price forever.’
‘From where I’m standing, it looks like I’m the one paying.’
‘I know. But what would you have had me do? It was … logical. The needs of the many …’
No, Ross thought: do not go there.
‘… outweigh the needs of the few,’ the avatar went on. ‘Or the one.’
He fucking went there.
‘But you weren’t the one.
I
was. It cost you nothing and cost me everything. So don’t try tugging my heartstrings with your lame
Wrath of Khan
comparison. I didn’t make a noble sacrifice, because I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t volunteer.’
‘Yes, but I knew that if it was me,
I’d
volunteer. And as, in a manner of speaking, it
was
me, then I felt qualified to make the call.’
‘But it’s not the same call. You’ve
had
your life: marriage, kids, California
uber alles
. The scale of the sacrifice would look different if you were the guy who just stepped into that scanner.’
The avatar nodded, conceding the point. Finally it looked like Ross had met someone whom he could defeat in an argument. Then
the avatar ruined it by stabbing home a last-minute equaliser.
‘So what call would you make?’ his future self asked. ‘Tell me, if it
had
been your choice: would you give up your future in the real world to save all the people in that one?’
Ross didn’t answer, though it was kind of pointless taking the fifth when the other person knew what you were thinking.
He tried to come up with something magnanimous to say before terminating the connection, but opted for ‘Fuck you’ instead.
Jennifer gave him an apologetic look.
‘You should be angry at me too,’ she said. ‘We took this decision together.’
‘
You
didn’t. The real-world Jennifer did. You’re the one who’s stuck here, not her. See, I think I worked out why Solderburn never
came back once he’d found a way out. He must have thought that sooner or later someone – one of the Originals probably – would
suss he was responsible for putting everybody there. All those people cut off from their loved ones, cut off from their lives,
left wondering why. He must have been terrified of them finally being given someone to blame. But the Solderburn in here was
as much a victim as everybody else. Jay Solomon put him here, just like Ross Baker put me here.’
‘None of us asks to be born,’ Jennifer told him. ‘But I didn’t hold it against you and Mum that you brought me into the world
and gave me life without running it past me first. Not after the age of about fourteen, anyway.’
Ross couldn’t help but smile. He threw an arm around her and placed a small kiss on the top of her head. As he did, he
felt the heat of the Graxis sunshine on his shoulders. Here it was never night, never cold.
‘I suppose there are some advantages to this place,’ he admitted. ‘I bet it’s fucking raining in Stirling.’
Once more Ankou experienced that revolting sensation of the world around him swallowing itself and then vomiting it forth
again. It didn’t get any easier to endure, nor was it delivering him to anywhere he hadn’t already been. He materialised on
a depressingly familiar spawn pad, his momentum taking him forward a pace before he could orient himself, and he managed to
stop just short of the edge of the cold murky pool that lay in the shadow of the cliff. It ran around like a natural perimeter,
this unscalable and impenetrable wall that hemmed him in and permitted no glimpse of what might lie beyond.
He had found no evidence of any transits: just portals between the same few discrete and uniformly desolate regions. According
to his HUD, this one was called Claustrophenia and he had just warped there from Death’s Dark Vale. The landscapes all looked
like Graxis; the architecture too: lots of sewers and stairways, towers and platforms. He hadn’t seen any NPCs, though. He
appeared to be the only person here.
He had been conned.
This was the final fuck-you, and its true sting was in how stupid he now felt for believing his enemy would have let him off
so lightly.
You’ll step through this gateway and find a life for yourself here
, Baker had said, presumably his idea of poetic justice. He had stranded him on one barren and lonely world, unable to escape:
just like the Integrity had been prescribing for everybody else. Oh, the pathos, the irony. Colour me suitably ashamed.
Self-righteous prick.
He didn’t think he could possibly feel any worse. It was bad enough that he had failed so comprehensively in his mission,
but what burned all the more was the nature of it. Not only had he been defeated by Ross fucking Baker, but he’d been played
like a rube by the guy’s
daughter
.
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t stranded in one place, but in six or seven mini-worlds from which he was able to come and go
at will using his pitifully function-limited new HUD. However, that was the extent of his freedom. There was no way out. No
food or drink either; the protocols meant it wasn’t necessary, but if he was stuck here forever, he was going to seriously
miss snarfing a porterhouse and washing it down with a Napa Zinfandel.
One thing there was a shitload of, however, was guns. After all the Integrity weapons had been rendered useless, Ankou had
expected to find these ones neutralised too, but it turned out they all did deliver damage. There was no pain, though; only
hit points. Evidently the place was some kind of combat simulation: no doubt another poignant statement from Baker regarding
what Ankou’s plans had been for the inhabitants of the menagerie.
He looked up at the purple sky and shouted.
‘Okay, what the fuck. You made your point. You won and I’m real sorry. Come on: what do you want from me? You want tears of
contrition? You want me on my knees? Seriously, you can order off the menu here. God knows I would.’
A moment later he felt that horrible dissolving sensation again as he was involuntarily respawned about a quarter-mile from
where he had been standing. At least it appeared that someone was listening.
There was a shimmering disturbance in the air in front of him, and suddenly he found himself looking at the biggest, baddest,
craggiest, most ripped-looking and thoroughly scary hunk of masculinity he had ever seen.
The new arrival’s name flashed up on the HUD next to his own, each adjacent to the corresponding figure ‘0’.
Ankou held his arms apart in a gesture of appellate cooperation.
‘Okay, whoever you are, I just want to stress that I have no quarrel with you, I pose you no threat and I am entirely willing
to cooperate. I am one hundred per cent at your disposal. Just tell me what it is you want me to do.’
A countdown commenced, starting at ten seconds.
The Reaper grinned, priming his railgun.
Since his award-winning debut
Quite Ugly One Morning
,
Christopher Brookmyre
has established himself as one of Britain’s leading crime novelists. This hasn’t stopped people from nagging him to write
SF instead, and he hopes they think this was worth it.
Find out more about Christopher Brookmyre and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
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