Authors: Justina Robson
A pack of cigarettes and some HighFive chewing gum, full of dope and tranquillizers, was laid out for him on top of the TV. He took some of it, because there was nothing else to do. So, Shelagh Carter, huh? That bitch.
He shivered and looked around for the heating or a blanket. His clothes smelled rank from being damp with river water for so long.
The gum juice flowed sweetly over his tongue. He started to feel better.
Then the door opened and there she was, a person who'd never fit in a neighbourhood like this with her blue suit and her immaculate face and her shining hair. Civil Servant Barbie carrying a scanner in her hand as if she were starring in her own Manga cartoon, fingernails frosted pink on the trigger guards.
“You've been most helpful, Mr. Connor,” she said politely in a British accent that suddenly sounded hammy, although that might have been the gum in Dan's brain. “I'm very sorry. This is nothing personal, you understand.”
“Oh yeah?” he said but stopped there, because he couldn't think of anything witty or even the right line or voice to do it in. She was going to kill him and he didn't even know why. His legs started shaking. He thought,
I should have bought that bloody ticket at the travel place and gone to Rio. Oh fuck.
“What is it, then?”
“Business,” she said and pointed the machine at him.
He flinched but felt nothing. He swallowed the gum by accident and felt it slide in a lump down his throat and stick halfway. He looked around him and wondered where he was and how he'd got there, what it meant, and why he didn't understand.
“Where am I?” he asked her.
“Nowhere,” she assured him.
He nodded: that made sense. “Who am I?”
“No one.” She turned to the two hooded men who had followed her in. “Hold him up against the back wall,” she said, “and turn the lights on.”
She smiled at him. “Everything's okay. You're doing fine.”
He smiled back at her, happy to be doing fine. He stood in the bright lights and looked into the screen of her Pad. They were sending someone a picture. You smiled in pictures. You gave them your best side.
Natalie's Pad thrummed in her bag for a few moments, trilled patiently a few more as she fumbled to get it out of her jacket, and then emitted a high-pitched baby-squeal of fear to get her attention.
As the expensively dressed couple on the other side of the aisle started tutting she silenced it with a deft move and the call arrived on-screen as she raised it to her face, wondering who could have located the number, hoping it was Dan but dreading the answer. Any security agency worth a damn could have probably found her by now.
Dan's face loomed into view, lurching forward towards the camera at his end of the call as though he was drunk. His hair was greasy and dishevelled and he looked terrible. He had a peculiar, zany smile on his face.
“Dan, you silly arse,” Natalie began, whispering close to the mike inlet and grinning at him with delight. “Thank goodness you'reâ”
He looked puzzled and stumbled in saying her name, when suddenly he was yanked out of shot.
A great big fist of ice suddenly clamped around her throat and in her chest, making her breath lurch and stall. At the same moment she turned the Pad in her hand, trying to see around corners with it. But whoever was controlling the image was already letting her see more than she liked.
The view panned back to reveal a room with cheap floral wallpaper and a boarding-house air of too much nylon lace and yellowing white paint. Dan was held against a wall, pinned by two figures in dark
clothes whose heads were covered in the reflective mylar bags that large circuit boards are shipped in to protect them from static and magnetic interference.
Natalie was trying to understand what she was seeing, had started to say, tentatively, “Dan?” when a woman's face appeared.
Natalie immediately thumbed the “record” command but it didn't work. She glanced down, trying to see if she had missed it, when a voice that was processed into a hoarse, throaty drawl came from the speaker.
“Dr. Armstrong. I suggest you stop trying to fix your machine and listen. You have two minutes. First, let me show you that I mean what I say.”
Natalie looked closely at the face that filled the whole of shot for those few seconds, trying to extract every bit of information from it that she could.
It was youngish, thirty-five, she thought. The features were small and regular and the skin a smooth Celtic white, plump with rich cosmetics. A few freckles dashed over the nose and cheeks in palest ochre, so well-placed they might have been tattooed there for their light-hearted effect. The eyebrows were a natural redhead's auburn and the long, thick curly hair the same colour. The eyes themselves were blue, although they looked like fakes, contacts over another shade. Natalie saw naked ambition, wit, intelligence, and a will strong enough to ride roughshod over anything in its path. The combination was startlingly attractive, as this sudden new enemy turned her shoulder with an elegant twist, so that the rest of the scene came back into view.
With a graceful movement the woman raised her arm. Her hand held a gun of a sort Natalie had never seen before. It was grotesquely large and blunt in her grip, looked like it should be too heavy to lift but she never even shook a hair on her head with the effort of raising it. There was a soft, sibilant noise and a wide red circle appeared on the wall behind Dan's right thigh. Natalie heard his scream as the
woman turned and blocked him from sight, looking into Natalie's face.
The screaming was a near-unbelievable noise, high and terrified and uncomprehending; the product of a pain that killed all awareness of anything else. It ripped out of the Pad's digitally perfected speaker at a distorting volume and tore through the first-class cabin of the aircraft with a force that made several people shriek with fear that they were undergoing explosive decompression. A nervous jolt and the shooting needles of horror in her chest made Natalie shake so badly that she dropped the Pad and had to scrabble around on the floor for it. It screeched and gibbered face down.
“Excuse me!” began the expensively dressed woman over the aisle, as loudly as possible. “I hardly think that horrorâ”
“Fuck off!” Natalie hissed at her, coming up from her crouch, the words so venomous that the woman went white and shrank away from her. Natalie didn't take her eyes from the Pad. Her heightened senses and the peculiar “aliveness” of her being since the last acceleration of the Selfware suddenly escalated. The plane and the other people ceased to exist.
“Listen and then answer me,” the redhead said, calmly waiting for breaks in the sound of Dan screaming, and smiling at Natalie's difficulties, which no doubt she could hear very well. “If you don't, then I finish what's left of him.” She turned again and raised her arm.
“Wait! Stop!” Natalie cried, pulling the Pad close to her face in the hope that they would hear her more clearly. “Stop! Please! Let him alone. What is it?” If they had intended to throw her off balance they had succeeded all too well. Some part of her that didn't require conscious attention informed her that a steward was coming towards her, and that people were looking and starting to point.
This time there was no gun. Natalie recognized the scanner instantly.
It was pointed at Dan. He stopped screaming and stood up straight, his face uncrumpling like a film played in reverse.
Blood pooled heavily around his right foot and there was a faint
stain on his left leg, like an afterthought, where vaporized blood had finally sunk in, but now it was as though there was nothing wrong with him. He looked calm and attentive, even grinned a little in the old way as he said, easily, “Hey, Nat, what's cookin' ya?”
“Dan!” she said softly, touching the screen where his image moved, unsteadily balancing on its only good leg. She realized what they were using and that he must have been infected long before this blew up, long before Jude appeared. How had she not noticed before, when she'd had time to do something about it? Was that what he'd tried to ask her about when she'd told him to shove off, on Bobby's day?
The woman came back into full shot.
“Your friend is infected with a mind-system very similar to your own. But then, I expect you know all about that, Doctor, from Jude Westhorpe.” No trace of an expression other than straightforward calm crossed her face. “We are ready to forgive your actions against us if you will return immediately to your US destination as planned. Otherwise I regret that we will have to employ our functional mindware on you, in order to ensure your cooperation with the project.”
As she finished speaking she raised the scanner and keyed in a new command.
Natalie saw that it was a string sequence that would cause the NervePath in Dan's brain to shut down the synapses completely. If he had reached saturation it was certain death.
Natalie could hardly get her mouth to work. She watched the woman watching her. The pale face held no pity as Natalie tried to speak, and she knew then that Dan was dead, because she, Natalie, Brain of fucking Britain, didn't know what to do.
“Let him go,” she whispered, pleading without shame. She tried to pour her emotion down into the lens of the Pad, into that blank statue's face.
“I agree. I'm en route to Washington anyway. I won't cause any trouble. Whatever you say. Let him go. Take him to hospital! Please.”
The auburn woman nodded and her curls bobbed perkily against her neck. Then she turned and pointed the scan unit at Dan again as Natalie started to scream.
“No! Don't!” Natalie yelled in fury, shaking the Pad. “Let him go!”
But Dan was speaking, lightly conversational, in his English gent's voice, ever so, ever so, and what he was saying were words straight out of a report that Natalie had written, just twenty-four hours ago:
“The Selfware programme tested on Bobby X is a learning system that maximizes host cognitive abilities to their limits, within the parameters of the design view. The speed of change is determined by preexisting structures and potentials. With the alteration in place the NervePath system becomes symbiotic within the host central nervous system. Any attempt to interfere with, or remove, the NervePath nanytes will probably cause immediate and total cessation of all neural activity.”
He grinned and waved weakly at her, back to his old self for the last moment. “Natalie, check it out, girl.”
His body folded down, joints collapsing, and lay sprawled on the floor, his head turned away from her. The bloodstain spread on the squalid carpet underneath him; long shadow under set of sun. He was still.
The uninterested guards walked over him, as though he were a bag of rubbish.
The beautiful woman returned for the last time.
Natalie met her eyes through the link and thoughtâ
I'll find you. And you'll wish I hadn't.
Inside her, a shift of Selfware or a shift of self caused everything uncertain in her to fuse. It became solid, absolute. She realized why Bobby was prepared to hang around to see some action.
“We'll send you a limousine.” She was so cordial. Such a pro. She took pride in that, like it was a business thing, a clever thing, a trick she'd pulled off already. There was her weakness.
“Do that,” Natalie replied, more cold and full of hate than she had ever felt in her life, a sensation inside her as though her skeleton was turning into metal, her insides coagulating into a kind of engine that
could run and run until it found this woman and squeezed the life out of her one drop at a time. “You do that.” She cut the transmission and sat on her seat edge, breathing slow, measuredâ
a deep breath is a
â¦
The steward was leaning pointedly at her, waiting for just that cue.
“There's a private cabin just ahead for intimate personalâ” he began. Then Natalie looked up at him.
His mouth worked vacantly, trying to reel his words back in.
“Where are we?” she demanded.
“Uh, just beginning our descentâ¦what are you doing? No, no, you can't get up now, madam, the plane is about to go into full reentry and the turbulenceâ¦excuse me!”
Natalie pushed him out of her way and walked quickly towards the front of the plane. She passed two more crew in the last stages of strapping down the drinks trolley and put her hand on the entry to the cockpit.
“You can't go in there!”
It was locked anyway, with some numeric keypad combination, but as the steward came after her to try and pull her away Natalie looked carefully at the grease-dirtied marks on the keypad, the shininess of the numbers. Somewhere in flight she'd already heard them type it in. Her fingers moved before she knew what it was.
One Three Two One.
The door opened. With the steward hanging onto her jacket tails she clawed her way through and into the tiny space behind the navigator console. She saw the entire cabin in a flash and reached out instantly for the aerosol pepper spray the steward was trying to fumble out of its webbing in a quick recall of his hijack training.
She flicked off the lid and zapped him with a dose, kicking him backwards out of the way as he bent double, yowling, then reached around behind herself and ripped the keypad off the wall with a strength born of rage. The door buzzed unhappily and slammed shut: another antiterrorist tactic.
Natalie tossed the lump of wires and fascia on the floor and braced herself against the bulkhead as the two pilots stared at her, full of hostility. One was grappling around with his foot for the emergency stud, but slid in his seat as they started to brush against the atmosphere and the plane's body juddered.
Through the windows Natalie could just see the high curve of the Earth's blue sky, brilliant as sunlight shot through it, singing off white clouds and sparkling on the distant surface of the ocean. They were plunging towards it, and the first traces of reentry heat and compressed gas were beginning to flare over the nose. She wondered where Dan's body was and if it would ever be found.