Nasira looked up. Her gaze bore right through Sophia. ‘Parapsyche Celaeno active. Awaiting command.’
Sophia retreated to the edge of the bathtub. The student was wriggling about, with little effect.
‘Long had paled that sunny sky,’ Sophia said. ‘Echoes fade and memories die.’
‘All parapsyche backups erased,’ Nasira said.
The parapsyches themselves were still there, Sophia knew, but she’d get to those later, when time was on her side. ‘Execute parapsyche designation Lycaon.’
‘Lycaon loaded,’ Nasira said. ‘Slave mode enabled.’
Sophia turned to the student and ripped off the tape. He screamed in pain, the skin around his lips flushed red. Sophia leaned over him and he sank further down into the bathtub, breathless.
‘Whatever you did to attract the attention of the Fifth Column,’ she whispered. ‘Stop.’
***
Nasira sat alone in one of the Akhana’s holding cells, cross-legged on the floor, head down. Sophia watched her carefully. She looked like she was meditating.
‘Nasira,’ she said. ‘Terminate parapsyche designation Lycaon.’
‘Terminated,’ Nasira said.
‘Shut down neopsyche designation Alcyone,’ Sophia said.
‘Parameter missing.’ Nasira looked up through the bars, at Sophia’s legs. ‘Command unsuccessful.’
‘Shut down neopsyche designation Alcyone; soft reset.’
For a moment, Nasira remained sitting, then pulled back. She scrambled to her feet. ‘What are you motherfuckers doing to me?’
‘Welcome back,’ Sophia said. ‘I’ve erased your programming backups and your assassination program. For our safety. You’re now living through your real personality. And with no backups to restore from, it’ll stay that way long enough for me to deprogram you completely.’
‘What? What do you want from me, bitch?’ Nasira’s voice punched through the cell block.
‘Nothing,’ Sophia said.
Nasira opened her mouth, but didn’t seem to have a response for that. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re being held in the cell block of an Akhana base. I’m in the process of deprogramming you.’
Nasira launched towards Sophia, and was stopped by the metal bars. She glared at Sophia. ‘Akhana, the terrorist organization? Don’t you lay a finger on me, you psycho!’ she yelled.
Nasira’s aggression was normal. Sophia had been there herself once.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t need to lay a finger on you.’
‘I know all about you.’ Nasira tried to smile. ‘Got half your team killed. Tried to manipulate Damien and Jay into defecting, nearly got them killed. Abducted by a mentally disturbed clinical psychiatrist. A bit of brainwashing; Stockholm syndrome. You probably fucked the Soviet son of a bitch. I’m just glad someone wasted him before it was too late.’
‘You were sent on an operation. To eliminate a terrorist in Morocco.’
Nasira blinked. ‘Suicide bomber. An entire cell of them. They were planning to hit a mosque. You brought me all the way here—’ she looked around ‘—to Buttfuck Land, to ask me this shit?’
‘How would you feel, Nasira, if the answer you gave me was not real?’
Nasira snorted. ‘Don’t talk to me about reality.’
‘But what if it isn’t real?’ Sophia said. ‘What if your entire life hinges on the fact that you’ve been lied to? About yourself and about everything around you. That you subscribe to beliefs that are completely false.’
Nasira started laughing. ‘Are you trying to brainwash me? Or you just have some problem with my beliefs?’
‘I do when your enemy is fictitious. A myth thought up by the Fifth Column marketing department. That suicide bomber you were sent to assassinate was a peaceful college student who knew a little too much.’
Nasira smiled. ‘I’d say you need some help, because you are one motherfucker who has seriously lost touch with reality.’
‘What if it isn’t me who’s lost touch with reality, but you?’
Sophia brandished her pistol, then placed it in front of the bars, within Nasira’s reach. She stepped back and smiled. ‘Or, more to the point, you were never in touch with reality to begin with?’
Nasira’s lips curled. ‘I don’t think you know the meaning of reality.’
‘World War Two: a spontaneous rise of fascism, with the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other?’ Sophia said. ‘Hardly. Africa: an entire continent naturally stuck in poverty? I don’t think so. The war on terror: Muslims attack the west; the west responds to defend and spread freedom and democracy? Yeah, right. The Miami Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Newburgh Four, the Underwear Bomber, the Portland Car Bomber—the Fifth Column set them up and knocked them down. Dozens of straw men created to convince everyone the war on terror is real.’
‘You don’t think the war is real?’ Nasira approached her slowly. ‘What drugs are you on?’
‘It’s very real,’ Sophia said. ‘But the war you see is a performance. You’re winning that war, but you’re losing the real one. The real war is the war for your mind. The real war is waged by the Fifth Column against humanity.’
‘You’re insane.’ Nasira paced near the pistol, but didn’t try to pick it up. ‘I think you’ve been reading from the fiction shelf for too long.’
‘The difference between us is that I know what fiction is.’ Sophia turned to leave. She heard the slide of a pistol snap back. ‘Or at least I do now.’
‘Let me out,’ Nasira said, pistol in hand. ‘Or they’ll come looking for me. You
do not
want that shit coming down on you.’
‘The exquisite corpse will drink finest wine,’ Sophia said.
In one fluid movement, Nasira turned the pistol on herself. She squeezed the trigger.
***
‘Fill the glasses with treacle and ink,’ Sophia said.
Nasira blinked, pried the barrel from her temple. ‘How the fuck did you do that?’
‘I can do that because I left your Auto-Thanatos parapsyche intact.’
‘Talk English.’
Sophia raised her eyebrow, conscious of the scar that divided it. ‘Auto-Thanatos is self-mutilation and self-destruction.’ She leaned forward. ‘I’m safe from you. But you, not so much.’
Nasira weighed the pistol with one hand. She gave Sophia a wry grin and discarded it. ‘It felt a bit light. So, let me get this straight. You’re saying I’m going around killing innocent people, thinking they’re terrorists. And this whole war on terror thing—what is that meant to be, a joke? I’m sorry, but that’s too stupid to take seriously.’
‘As long as we have a false enemy,’ Sophia said, ‘we’ll never discover the real one.’
‘Whatever you say.’ Nasira kicked the pistol through the metal bars, back to Sophia’s feet. ‘If you’re here to recruit me as part of your anarchist happy-clappy cult then think again.’ She folded her arms. ‘I’d rather shoot myself than wear a tinfoil hat and call you Morpheus. Or believe even for one goddamn minute that we’d even think of killing innocent people.’
Sophia shook her head. ‘It’s not that you can’t accept it. You’ve made up your mind in advance that such a possibility is ridiculous and no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise. So you dismiss everything before you see it.’
Sophia picked up the pistol and pressed the decocking lever. ‘Actually, you know what? It’s not that you can’t accept the possibility that you have it all wrong; you’re
unwilling
to.
Nasira smiled. ‘And why would I be unwilling? Because it’s bat-shit crazy?’
‘Because it falls too far outside of what you’ve been programmed to believe.’ From her pocket, Sophia produced a worn fifth generation iPod. She slid it across the tiles to Nasira. ‘Even if it’s staring you right in the face.’
‘What’s this? Your propaganda video?’
‘And you’re the star act,’ Sophia said.
Nasira picked up the iPod and tentatively hit the play button. She squinted at the screen. It showed a video of a security-camera recording: the programming of a young girl. Sophia had made sure none of the torture techniques applied to the girl were censored. She saw Nasira’s facial expression change. People’s jaws do actually drop, she thought. She already knew what Nasira was going to ask. She’d asked that question herself not long ago.
‘It’s real,’ Sophia said.
Nasira stopped the video, but didn’t look up. ‘So you say.’
‘Where do you think your fear of needles came from? Vaccinations?’
Nasira dropped the iPod. ‘You could have falsified that.’
‘And you could have tried to shoot yourself all on your own.’ Sophia smiled. ‘Neither of which serves logic by any stretch of the imagination.’
Nasira swallowed. ‘Let’s pretend for a moment that what you’re saying is . . . somehow . . . true. What the hell does it mean to me?’
‘It means you have two choices,’ Sophia said. ‘I can put your RFID back in your arm, switch you back over to zombie mode and you won’t remember a damn thing. You continue to live in the illusion that has been carefully constructed for you.’
Nasira ran her fingers along three fresh stitches in her right arm. Without the RFID, there was no way for the Fifth Column to know where she was.
‘And door number two?’ she said.
‘The tangible Nasira. The one that’s in control right now. The one that’s scared, confused, angry and, above all,
real
.’
Chapter 22
Blindfolded, Sophia felt the callused hand close over her neck. She rotated her shoulder and turned to one side, breaking the hand’s grip. She maintained contact with the arm, measured the next attack and deflected the attack ever so slightly past her head. As she did so, she stepped on the inside of the attacker’s knee, breaking his form. She could almost sense the next blow. She turned to one side. The attack brushed past her stomach. She touched the attacker’s wrist lightly, thrust her hips forward just a couple of inches.
If this weren’t an exercise, she would’ve broken the joint in his elbow using only her hip.
‘Good.’ Sergey, her instructor, removed his arm and untied her blindfold. ‘You’re improving fast.’
The base’s resident martial arts instructor was a bulky man with a weathered face and silver hair. The black T-shirt tucked into army camouflage pants and boots was as close as he came to gym clothing.
He held up the palm of his hand at Sophia’s eye-level. ‘Press your forehead against my hand.’
She did as he instructed, not sure what to expect. Another trick, perhaps? The old man was fond of those.
‘I’m going to apply pressure. I want you to resist.’
Sophia pressed her forehead hard against Sergey’s hand, pushing the hand away.
‘Easy, yes?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ Sophia pulled her head back.
‘Do not stop,’ Sergey said.
She pressed back into his palm, pushing his hand back towards him. She was winning. Then he wiggled his hand. Suddenly, he was pushing her backwards with ease. Sophia stumbled across the gym’s floor.
She took another step to gather her balance. ‘How did . . .? That was strange.’
What was strangest of all was this fighting system of his. In one sense, it was strangely familiar, and in another it was like nothing she had ever learned. And she had learned a lot.
Sergey smiled.
‘Why didn’t you teach us this in Project GATE?’ she said.
‘Denton recruited me for an earlier project. Problem was, my system had a habit of unraveling the operatives’ programming. You see, I teach people not just to fight but also to
think
. To free their body. To become a warrior. That cannot happen when you are a programmed soldier.’
He paced the gym, thumbs hooked into the front of his pants. The bare floor wasn’t padded to prevent injuries, and Sergey had insisted it remain that way. A real fight will not have padded floors, he told her.
‘I teach an arrangement of principles,’ he said. ‘They are malleable, adaptive. But Denton’s operatives are programmed and imprisoned. Restricted. And Denton wants it that way. He doesn’t want them to become too powerful.’
Sophia ran a finger across the scar at her eyebrow. ‘I’m sure Denton wasn’t happy about you leaving just when he needed you.’
He shrugged. ‘He found another instructor. Now, do you see what I did to your forehead?’
‘Yeah.’ She sniffed. ‘But it doesn’t make sense.’
Sergey approached her. She readied herself for an unexpected attack.
‘Your brain can resist against one axis, but not against two, or three,’ he said. ‘By shaking my hand, I confuse your brain. This is one principle I am trying to teach you. This system is three-dimensional; in every possible way the warrior will disturb, disrupt, confuse. When the enemy attacks, the warrior can deflect, she can stretch time. If she must absorb a strike—’ He indicated his stomach. ‘Here, punch me. Hard.’
Sophia wrapped her thumb over her knuckles and dropped a solid punch into his stomach. He exhaled sharply and quickly, hips moving for the briefest of moments. She knew how to throw a punch. And that punch should have dropped him to his knees.
‘If you cannot avoid it, if you must absorb it, you can disperse it.’ Sergey clamped his hands on his hips. ‘I rotate my hips. Just a bit. The energy from your punch dissipates outwards in a spiral. Once you are more proficient, you can throw the energy anywhere you want. You can even throw it right back at your opponent.’
Sophia nodded. ‘I think I get it. But I can’t do it.’
‘But you will. Soon enough.’ He offered her his arm. ‘Grab my arm. Hold it tight.’
She held his arm as hard as she could. He shook it a few times, but she did not yield. She watched as he reached for her elbow with his other hand, brushed his palm down her arm, then shoved her off. Her grip was broken before she realized what had happened.
‘Wait. Let me do that again,’ she said.
She held his arm even tighter this time and watched him reach over. He brushed his hand swiftly down her arm, towards her wrist, then, with a minimal amount of effort, discarded her hand. She looked down at it. She had no idea how that worked.
She must have looked shocked because Sergey started laughing. ‘Electromagnetic disturbance,’ he said. ‘It disturbs the signals to the brain. No matter how hard you try, you cannot maintain your grip.’
Sophia nodded. ‘I guess it makes sense.’