Escapology (42 page)

Shock Pao
, she says, and her voice deafens him, roaring like a hurricane through his brain.
Did you not think we knew you would try to run? Did you not think we would have means to bring you back to us? Amuse us. Try again. Try and run.

Shock has no intention of remaining. He stumbles on toward the end of the walkway. Weighed down by the Queen’s monstrous presence, Emblem stirs. Wakes. And in those moments of waking, it throws her from his mind, some shadow of its old function temporarily come to life. She exits laughing, as if Emblem is a flea batting at her face. She’s right. This eviction is no more than a gesture. Emblem can’t keep her out, it’s not what it was; not just a lock any more.

Freed from the burden of her, Emblem finishes what it began before he used it to destroy Li; altering his perception, making him a living uplink forever both inside and outside of Slip. He’s running along a glass walkway, which is also a schematic, whilst floating inside of Slip, surrounded by millions of avis. The avis see him too. Curious, they stop to stare, and he realizes that he’s golden there, just as Breaker made him before. An anomalous human-shaped fish.

Puss is beside him, serene and graceful, and Shark too, back in their ocean at last, and their delight radiates. They’ve been trapped far away from the familiar, and vulnerable. Now they’re like he is, half IRL and half in Slip—stronger than ever before. But they’re not strong enough, not dangerous enough. He warns them against attacking the Queens and makes for the shoot.

Through his new perception—the underlying patterns he used to only see with Puss’s help augmented by his reconnection to Slip—he can see in a glance how to crack his way in. So simple. Layers of VA undone with a single thought. Why can’t everything be like this? He steps in, amazed that even through this information overload and the chaos of Slip he knows where to put his feet.

Looking out across inner city as the shoot begins to travel downward, he finally sees the other Queens, all five of them, striding across the Gung. They dwarf everything, casting endless shadows between ’scrapers, over rooftops. Around them flit hundreds of drones, flashes of silvery light. He looks up again, wary of losing the sixth—or is she the first?—even though she’s too big to lose. She’s still watching him; he feels her interest as profoundly as if she were still inside his mind.

This close to her, with Emblem alive within him, he can finally see what she is. Avi after all. Josef’s avi. But not always his. Running through her in streams, the taste of Kamilla, never entirely forgotten. Stronger than Josef, more able, until she got sick. Until they
made
her sick, and now Josef too. And before them? Not avi at all. Intelligence. Pure calculation built from code and so strong, so full of intent they were afraid of it, tried to lasso it with human thought, human intent. And all it did was give her different ways to think. Different ways to outthink them. Are the other Queens like her? Like this?

He turns his attention back to them and finds them the same, but lesser. Later models, designed to corral her, and incapable of doing so. She made them part of her gestalt. Fine filaments link them all together, linking them to Josef’s Queen and, through her, to Josef. Parasites piggybacking his drive. He’s been trying to hold them back. Relying on Emblem to keep them in check, hoping it would hold until they could find a way to make it stronger, whilst suffering the pressure of them inside him.

And how long did Kamilla hold them back before him? Unthinkable that this struggle has gone on in such secrecy, that they’ve managed to keep it between them. Then again, it’s easy to make people believe what you want them to when you have access to their minds through something like Slip. How many times will they have subtly rewritten the truth that way?

The Queen bends down, watching him travel in the shoot, suffocating him with her presence. He wants nothing more than to be wherever she can’t touch him. The hunger in her gaze horrifies him.

Shock!

Petrie.
Shock nearly drops to the floor, relief stealing what little strength he has. Tries to keep himself from showing elation, so the Queen can’t pick up on it.
Is Volk there?

Yeah, we lost maybe half of our people though.

Damn, I’m sorry.

Part and parcel. We’re on the top floor with Josef. He’s on the way out. Says the Queens are beyond his control anyway. What do we do? How can we help you?

How can they help him? He wracks his brain, trying and failing to come up with any solutions.

I don’t know.

Volk interrupts with her usual impatience, and something else. Something he’s never heard from her. Excitement.

Shock, the Queens are avis. Well, the Alpha is, sort of, and the others resonate that way through her.

Yeah, I know. How’d you guess?

Josef told me. I have an idea.

The shoot reaches ground level. Shock looks out onto a chaotic mass of people trying to run from things so giant there’s literally no way outrun them. Trying to escape drones intent upon killing everything in their path. There’s blood everywhere, on everyone, people falling down in the street, their avis falling in Slip all around him, some writhing as if fighting death with everything they have, others unfurling to bytes as they go. A confetti of gold.

He sends Shark after the drones, to turn them off, smiles viciously as they too begin to drop from the sky, silver amongst the gold. There are too many for Shark to deal with alone, but it won’t tire. It’ll keep on until they’re all gone. The Queens will remain though, and he already knows they have no good intentions for the Gung.

Tell me.

I brought a weapon with me. A drug called Disconnect. You can guess what it does, the effect it would have. I was going to use it on you. Make sure the Queens could never reach Emblem.

This is news. Not so long ago it would have been enough to end his part in this endeavour, no matter how important. But he understands now. He’d do the same.

What can you do?

Isolate the Queens inside their server, like a giant flash drive.

They’re connected to Josef. Will you use it on him?

On his drive. If I embed it in the section dedicated to Core, with all its separate VA protocols, I can make a prison for them, disconnect them from everything. Then we shut down Core, and they’re gone.

Core is the centre of Slip, Volk. Know what they put there? Our avis. All their information. Shut Core down, and you shut down all the avis.

Silence.

Shit. What can we do? It needs to be Core. It can’t be Hive. Shutting Hive would be catastrophic. Everything would go dark: Gung, hubs, land ships. The world as we know it: gone.

Shock looks around again, at all the people running. At Slip, avis falling gracefully to the seabed. Avis and drives are intertwined. Core might hold all the data for avis, but avis originate from the drive, inextricably linked to each one. Shock contains Emblem, and Emblem freed his avis from Slip. They’re linked only to him now, reintegrated. Three into one. What if he could do that for everyone?

I could bring the avis out of Slip, all of them.

Silence.

You can do that?
Something like awe in her voice.

Emblem can, I think.

You think?

If it can’t, we’re screwed huh? Go. Do what you need to.

Okay.
She pauses.
Shock, when I start to do this, I think they’ll come for you. Try to force their way in. Don’t let them. If they manage to take over from your avis, then I’ll have to use your drive for this, and I will not hesitate, because they cannot stay out, they cannot control us. Understand?

Shock closes his eyes.
Yeah. I understand.

IRL he limps to the courtyard, between glistening sculptures, and with Puss in Slip he travels to Core, amazed at how easy it is now, the VA parting before him as if he’s a god. He tries to figure out how to recreate what happened to him without quite knowing how Emblem did it. Working blind. Struggling against Emblem until he realizes Emblem is the part of him that knows how to do this. So he leaves it to that part of himself, concentrating on keeping the physical self out of drone fire, hidden from anyone in the crowd who might have followed him to Heights.

Turns out he’s not so great at hiding now he’s no longer a Haunt. Yang yells his name. Concealed behind sculptures, behind cars, behind anything solid enough to protect them, are his troops, firing at drones alongside the Dengway Mafia and the Grey Cartel, brought together by fear and circumstance. Yang yells again, and they cease firing. Turn their guns on Shock.

“Where can you go?” Yang calls out as Shock continues walking. “You’re ours.”

Shock doesn’t slow. Doesn’t even acknowledge them. They won’t shoot him, he’s too valuable, and Emblem’s almost done.

Any. Second. Now.

“Come along, Shock, have some dignity,” Yang calls out, almost friendly. He thinks he’s won. They all do. In a way they have. They just don’t know it yet.

Emblem sighs in his body, in his cells. Not a sound of satisfaction. This sigh is like something once sealed tight finally opening, that breath of release when the locks are breached and the doors swing wide. A lock becomes a key. So much more than Breaker and Josef meant for Emblem to become. Shock stops to watch, seeing in the activity of Slip how breath has paused. None of the avis around him seem to know what to do. The door is open, and they don’t understand that they’re free.

The exodus begins unexpectedly, with a woman hiding in the shadow of liquid-metal sculptures trapped in plas-glass, her arms clasped to her chest like armour. Her eyes tune out. Go blank. She grabs her head, fingers tensed into her skull. Broken-throated screams erupt from her like vomit and in the depths of her eyes, gold lights begin to swirl, particles to form, bursting like rays of sunlight to illuminate the sculptures, turn liquid metal into liquid light.

From her, it’s a knock-on effect. Human dominoes. Hands rise to skulls, eyes burst golden beams like search lights across the sky and, from here to the city limits and beyond, in the hubs and on the land ships, avis weave themselves into being. Millions upon millions of avis threading from Slip to RL. Disappearing from one place to the other like sand through the neck of an hourglass, glistening as they go. Fucking hell but it’s beautiful. Shock’s arrested by the sight. Stolen. Unable to move as street becomes Slip. Becomes oceanarium. Alive with golden sea life.

Eels dart between legs; ponderous dugongs graze the traffic; schools of tuna dance between streetlights; dolphins dive across the roofs of cars; seals frolic, chasing each other through the air. Everywhere Shock looks are hammerheads, squid, narwhals, lionfish, sunfish, anglerfish, every manner of marine life, real or imagined, from the tiniest shrimp to the impossibly huge pod of great golden humpbacks gliding down the centre of the Strand, silent and majestic as ocean liners. They open their mouths and mournful song echoes from glass and steel. Life is everywhere, glistening even without sunlight. Transforming the street, the city, the world, into a goldmine no one can touch.

Momentarily confused by the chaos, the escape of the avis, the drones ceased fire. Now they begin again, pushed by the Queens to destroy this rich centre of the Gung. But other avis, looking from Slip through human eyes, have already seen what Shark’s been doing, and they join him in their hundreds, their thousands, taking down every drone they touch. Emptying the sky, transforming silver flashes to soaring flocks of gold.

Breathing in deep, Shock begins to limp forward again, aware there’s nowhere he can go to hide, but determined not to be caught waiting. Yang runs toward him, lifting his gun, his face full of the same delirium, the same confusion Shock remembers from when his avis first came out of Slip. Only this morning. Still only this morning. How far he’s come.

Yang’s avi is a moray eel, poking out from under his arm; its face belligerent even in repose. Resting bitch face. Figures.

“Stop,” Yang demands, his gun trembling. “What’ve you done?”

“Saved you,” Shock says, still walking. “We have to stop the Queens. We’re going to lock them in Core, shut it down. Your avi was in there. You want it in there when that happens? Tell me you could survive it. Go on. Lie to me.”

Yang can’t seem to find words. His first instinct will be to lie, and there’s no way to do it. No words to find that will fit a lie that works. Shock watches as realization follows intent across Yang’s face. As his arm, catching up with thought as the body often does—in slow motion, a beat behind—lowers toward the ground.

“Go,” he says. “Get the hell out of here.”

It happens then, right in front of Yang. The Queens fall on Shock’s mind. Dig in, huge and irresistible; their hunger so potent he vomits blood. He falls to the ground on hands and knees, his brain under siege. For the second time he hears Puss scream, feels Shark thrashing in pain as the Queens try to tear them loose, to destroy them, and Shock’s screaming too. Pure agony. Screaming, retching, and fighting with everything he’s got to hold his drive shut, keep them out. Screaming internally at Emblem to hold him together, to lock him tight.

If the Queens get in, if even one of them gains a foothold, he’ll lose his avis, himself, and in this moment, understanding that, he finally begins to comprehend how little of himself he knew. How much of him was hidden in them. How much he let them hide from him, because he couldn’t bear to see it. Whole reams of self locked safely within them and about to be ripped away. He wants to see it, to learn himself, to learn to live with himself. It’s not too late. It can’t be.

Volk yells into his mind.
Hold on, Shock! Just hold on in there. I’m going as fast as I can.

He could tell her he’s trying. He is. But the Queens are too strong. He can’t fight them like this. Has to find another way, a way to be equal to them somehow. An advantage. He can only think of one, and it fills him with as much dismay as hope. Shock looks into Slip for that thing Li left behind when she died. The Kraken. He finds it where it was, coiled up tight, and all as huge, all as revolting.