Cronix (34 page)

Oriente’s job was at the more glamorous end of the operation, something he had ensured by slipping the human resources guy an extra five hundred bucks on top of the grand he’d given Doctor Wilson to let him pass without a chip. Now, as the wind whipped around them, he knew it was the right choice.

The Exit Teams worked in pairs, attached by a harness to an overhead metal scaffold, just in case a panicked leaper dragged them over the edge. They guided clients to the edge of the precipice, holding the hands of nervous children, giving a helpful shove to the reluctant, an encouraging cheer to the exuberant. When the leapers had gone over, the team would wait a minute until a green light above their station came on and a buzzer sounded, then the next group would move forwards, warned by ushers that once they had passed the Point of No Return they would have to go over the edge in order not to cause delays.

“We officially refer to the clients at this stage as leapers,” bellowed Doreen over the wind. “Just in case you’re interested, it was the name given to stockbrokers who leapt from skyscrapers after losing all their money in the 1929 Wall Street Crash.” She looked up from her notes, which clearly included the instruction ‘smile,’ which she duly did. Then she added, in a fake-conspiratorial whisper that in fact turned into a shout over the whipping of the wind, “And in the company, the Exit Teams are known as ‘gargoyles,’” because they are perched up so high on the ledges of the building.

Oriente watched as the nearest ‘gargoyle’ came up to meet a pair of jittery women in their twenties.

“Nervous? Naw, don’t be, you’ll love it,” the man shouted. “You’ll soon be up there on the screen, giving the thumbs up to all these people here. Who you signed up with? Headspace? Great company, lots of people go with them…” by which time the women were already standing on the lip of eternity, their nervous giggles vanishing at the prospect of the drop.

Further along the precipice, another gargoyle was studiously ignoring the fact that the young man he was guiding to the lip of the building had pissed his pants. In the pulp pit below, no one was going to notice.

“Go on then, it’s all out there, just waiting for you,” the first gargoyle shouted to the women, then gave them a little shove, discreetly so as not to alarm the next clients already being escorted from the elevators: a man dressed in a flea-bitten King Kong outfit, his girlfriend in a flimsy Fay Ray dress that caught the wind and showed off her shapely, soon-to-mangled figure. The man in the gorilla suit waved cheerily to the foreign tourists clustered on the rooftops below, showing off for the long-lens Japanese cameras. Gorilla man had a quick stab at an improvised Charleston with a bravado that probably came from the booze vendors working the crowds of pilgrims down on Fifth.

There were plenty of costumes, Oriente saw – skeleton suits, Grim Reapers, angels and Supermen in red capes who would soar for only the briefest of moments. The corporation had dubbed the whole metamorphosis extravaganza the “Karnival of the Millennium.”

Oriente and his fellow trainees stared in wonder at the well-oiled operation, while Doreen shivered in the wind, waiting for the shift supervisor to whistle the order for a break: when he eventually did so, the ground crews rushed in to clear away the mangled corpses before the pile started to show over the tarps lining the streets below.

“This is Leon,” Doreen said as the squat supervisor barreled up, his brow etched into a permanent furrow. “Leon, this is Luis, he’ll be working with your teams from tomorrow.”

Leon nodded without extending his hand. Oriente smiled and shouted over the wind: “After all the millennia of prophecies of impending doom, who’d have thought the Apocalypse would be voluntary, eh?” Leon’s frown only deepened.

“Whatever,” he shrugged. “Just make sure they don’t drag you over, coz’ it takes a good ten minutes to haul your ass back up here. And that really snarls the system.”

***

The work of DKarn never stopped. The gargoyles toiled in shifts to accommodate the round-the-clock traffic. Oriente saw the adverts in the street as he commuted through the fast-emptying city.

“Bad day at work? Love life not satisfying? Why not kill yourself?”

Another had a picture of Marilyn Monroe. “Live fast, die young, have a beautiful avatar,” it said.

He started on the morning shift, showing up at six every day and hurling people to their deaths for a solid nine hours, lunch and tea breaks included.

The screams echoed in his ears all day. Suicide songs, the gargoyles called them. They said some leapers screamed all the way down and woke up on the other side still howling like new-borns. The sound tormented Oriente, and for the first two weeks he could hear the screams whenever he closed his eyes to sleep at night. Then he got used to it, and slept more easily.

There was nowhere to go in his brief lunch breaks except the staff canteen: getting out of the vast, overcrowded building took far too long. So he would chew his sandwich in the DKarn eatery, flicking through the tabloids left behind by other diners. He was always amused by the headlines, by the sheer havoc that
his
invention had wrought on the world while he sat here, anonymously, among the minimum-wage drones and with their burgers and fries.

“Fuckin’ tree huggers,” said his shift partner, Lincoln. He slapped his copy of the
New York Post
.

On the front page was a photo of a middle-aged woman standing before an enormous white bear that had raised its fore paw, ready for the kill. The story told of how an environmentalist group was organizing expeditions to go and help the polar bears, whose populations were dwindling fast on the melting ice floes. Whenever they spotted a starving bear, one of the chipped volunteers would shed their expensive Arctic parka and walk up to the starving creature, offering themselves up as handy meal. A spokesman for the group admitted it was a long haul across the ice, and physically demanding for many of the older members of the group, but that volunteers contacted from the afterworld reported the actual death was much less painful than they had expected: the bears tended to break their victim’s neck with a swift blow to the head.

“What a waste of time,” said Lincoln, who was perhaps one of the most non-descript humans Oriente had yet come across.

Oriente had been reading a copy of the
Times
: while he enjoyed the sensationalist
Post
, he liked to get a strategic overview of the world's dwindling populations. He scanned the headlines: England had banned the so-called lemming festivals -- rock concerts held on its southern cliffs where the audience was encouraged to throw themselves over to the beat of thrash metal – after several unchipped concert goers had been dragged over in the frenzy of a recent gig, in which even the band had taken the leap.

Another story described how the Six Flags rollercoaster park in Houston had started operating its rides without safety harnesses. Meanwhile, the Chinese government had sent in troops to various coastal cities to put down rebellions against its decision to officially ban chipping, for fear that it would lose its main strategic asset, its vast population. There were photos of a demonstration on Tiananmen Square, with protesters holding placards written in English and Chinese: “Down with the tyranny of our genes!” and “Better to be a lion for eternity than an ape for 70 years”.

Beijing was accusing US “missionaries” of being behind a series of illegal chippings: the authorities had found more than a thousand corpses in a warehouse in Shanghai. Autopsies revealed all the dead had been illegally fitted with transmitter chips.

An editorial at the back of the newspaper warned that the United States – indeed, the entire Western world – was facing a similar dilemma: if enough of their population vacated their land and bolted for the safety of an off-world heaven, would not the poorer nations simply move in and squat on what had once been America, Canada, France and Britain? What was to stop them, and what claim would the original owners have to the land should they ever come back? As a stop-gap solution, while the powers-that-be scratched their heads over new ethical and practical dilemmas, a vast wall was being built across the US-Mexico border. No mere electrified fence this – it was an eighty-foot concrete barrier studded with watchtowers that required the minimum number of troops to patrol it. In addition, USAID was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into overseas educational campaigns to encourage the rural poor of the Third World to get chipped and die.

Oriente always read the reports with a slight smile: Mother Earth was sweating off this virus of humanity.

***

An explosion jerked Swaincroft's attention away from the screen. He paused the hologram for the first time in hours. Looking out the window, he noticed it was already dark outside. Another boom.

He'd heard some sporadic shooting earlier, but paid no attention. Just the militia, shooting the runaways. Strange they would use explosives, though.

He peered into the gloom, noticed a flicker of flames somewhere to the north. Was that a building on fire? Maybe he should go up to the roof, see what's happening.

He had just left his office when the phone rang in his pocket. He was surprised to see it was Lola.

“Hello?”

“You have to leave, now,” she said. Her voice was urgent. Swaincroft could hear other voices behind her. She turned and spoke to someone.

“Lola?” he said.

“Yes. Leave the museum right now Quin. Come to the hospital.”

“The hospital? Why? I'm not sick.”

“They're chipping everyone. There's a big crowd here already, but I can get you in first. You have to get here as soon as you can.”

“Lola, what the hell's going on?”

“Jesus, Quin, don't you watch the news?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing ever happens these days. Why I would watch the news?”

She swore again. He could hear more voices in the background. “The mayor's dead,” she said, speaking to him again. “The Cronix are...no one knows what the fuck's happening with the Cronix. But they're thinking, Quin. They're planning. There's reports they raided an armory and are hunting people. A group of Rangers attacked the palace, slaughtered the mayor and the council of elders.”

Swaincroft was dumbfounded. “Quin, you still there?” Her voice was insistent.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I'm here.”

“Listen, you have to leave now. Come straight here. They're evacuating the peripheral villages, setting up a cordon, a safe zone. It's insane, I know, but you have to get here. Get a gun too.”

“I don't have a gun,” he said.

“Well, keep to the back roads then. Better still, stay in the trees. But come here right this instant.”

She hung up. Swaincroft was too surprised to move for a moment. But then he heard a door slam somewhere in the darkened building and a sudden primal fear seized him. Moving as quietly as he could, he made his way down a back staircase, of the museum. It was only when he was out in the deserted streets that he remembered the hologram of Oriente, sitting frozen on his desk.

What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Ah, the human body. The weight of it, the sheer heft of muscle and bone, too much for a person to lift, yet articulated by some inner belief, a faith that it all fits together and is meant to stand and walk. The vile corporeality of shanks and flanks, cliffs of meat and the endless internal oozing of wastes and fluids. The living carcass that knows not it is already dead, entropy’s lady-in-waiting, handmaiden of the corpse and the coffin worm.

Joao Karel di Vitulan,
The Ephemeral Artery (Collected Writings)

The police van clattered north, across the river and skirting the city's vestigial center. There was scarcely anyone on the roads. Though they passed occasional checkpoints manned by jumpy militiamen, no one tried to hinder their progress.

After an hour, they entered an area of forest and marshes. They crossed a wooden bridge before stopping at a tall, overgrown house. The constables bundled Oriente inside. The building was extremely old, a pre-Exodus tavern, judging by its design. There was still a rough wooden bar in one corner.

“Welcome to my workspace, Mr Oriente,” Wexler said, pulling off his police tunic. “Drink?”

Oriente shook his head. His host shrugged. “Little early in the morning perhaps? In that case, if you’d be so kind as to accompany me upstairs.”

He led Oriente up creaking stairs to a landing with several doors leading off it. Wexler opened one to reveal a spotless loft space, all gleaming equipment and polished metal surfaces. Oriente’s eyes raced around the room: at least there were no rusty knives or other sharp implements. Perhaps Wexler’s procedures were more advanced than he'd feared.

“If you don’t want a drink, can I at least fix you a coffee?” Wexler walked to a coffee mill in the corner and hand-ground some beans. “It’s as fresh as any you’ll find in London. We may be out in the boonies, but I do alright.”

He poured the coffee grounds into a tin cup, added water and put it over a Bunsen burner. “Hope you like it Turkish style,” he said.

When the brown liquid boiled he sprinkled in a generous dose of sugar and poured two tiny cups. “Sorry about the abrupt departure. But we decided to take advantage of the sudden chaos. The Eternals keep mistaking each other for Cronix and shooting one other, while the locals are terrified, flocking to church to pray for forgiveness, or getting the hell out of town. Though lots of them turned right around when they heard about the Cronix break-out.”

He opened a door at the far end of the lab. It led out on to a small balcony with a row of knee-high cages. Through the mesh Oriente could see geese.

“Been fattening them up for weeks,” Wexler said. “That way, you’ll be able fly the first few days without stopping, get clear of any urban areas or stray hunters who might want to take a pot shot.” He opened the mesh door of the first cage. There was an angry hissing from inside, but Wexler was quick and he grasped the bird by the neck.

“Now these are a special hybrid I’ve been working on,” he said, holding the beak between thumb and forefinger. “Part snow goose, which breeds in the Arctic and flies 5,000 miles every year to South America. It can keep going for up to 70 hours non-stop. Been known to cover 1,700 miles in that time frame. Impressive, no? And then there’s a bit of the bar-head thrown in. They're special because they migrate over the Himalayas, at an altitude of 30,000 feet – what planes used to fly at, back in the day – and where temperatures drop to minus 60 Fahrenheit. So these fat babies will take you up where you need to go. They migrate by instinct, so I’ve fiddled around with that a bit so you’ll know exactly which way to fly.”

Oriente was finding it difficult to breathe. “Wexler, please…really, I don’t know if I can…”

“Sure you can,” the tiny man cut in. “You don’t have to do anything. Flight is instinctual. You’ll love it, I swear. And if you're wondering why you should fly to see your new friends in the Zone … well, they're the only ones who can put Humpty dumpty back together again. So if you decide to fly someplace else, you’ll be a goose for the rest of your short life. Probably end up in some hunter’s oven. It’s your choice, at the end of the day.”

Oriente felt nauseous. He had to get out of this place. He turned, just as he saw Wexler raise his hand to check his watch. “Guessed you might not be so keen on the idea. That’s why I put a little tranq in your coffee, just to calm things down a little. Should kick in any second now. Oh, there’s not much point running. Just relax, have your sweet dreams. You’ll feel a little disoriented when you wake up for sure, but on the bright side, you’ll be light as a feather.”

Oriente stumbled through the door, rational thought ceding to sagging knees and spinning head. He crashed into a table, then sunk swiftly to the floor.

***

Wexler worked all day and through the following night, and when dawn broke the next day, the job was done. In six cages, the drowsy geese started to lift their shaven heads, one by one. The exhausted carpet-beater peered into each enclosure to inspect his handiwork.

“You in there, Mr Oriente?” he asked Goose Number 1. The bird stared blankly. Wexler leaned closer, his face inches from its beak.

“D’you hear me?” Very slowly, the goose bowed its head. Wexler grinned. “Only the best, my friend. Only the best.”

He moved to the next cage, where a goose was taking a few exploratory steps on its webbed feet.

“No 2, do we have contact? Are you aware of who you are?” Wexler said. The bird hissed as though trying to talk. “A nod’ll do just fine. You might have problems making much sense with that beak.”

Wexler worked his way down the cages, establishing that everything had worked. Then he stood in the middle of the room, the beady gaze of every bird focused on him.

“Congratulations, Mr Oriente, the goose has landed,” he said. “No hitches. You are as intact as any man implanted into a flock of geese could hope to be. Now, I’m going to open up these doors and let you find your feet. Try your goose-step.”

The birds cautiously shuffled out, walking in small circles.

“Very good,” crooned Wexler. “You know what? I think we should get this show on the road. Follow me, Messers Oriente.” He opened the door to the stairs and ushered the flock through. Hissing and flapping, the birds awkwardly followed him up the steps and on to the flat roof.

“Here we are,” said Wexler. The birds craned their necks over the parapet, down at the distant ground. “Now, you’ll find that once you take off, instinct kicks in. I can’t tell you how to fly, you already know that. It's programmed into the goose part of your brain. So, who’s first?”

The geese backed away, hissing. Wexler laughed. “Oh come, on, it’ll be magnificent. This is the ancient dream of mankind, unassisted flight, free as a bird in the sky.”

He made a lunge for one of the geese. “Don’t be a pussy, now, come on.” The bird delivered a stinging peck to his hand.

“Sonofabitch, I ought to wring your neck and cook you up for dinner.” The bird stared back, defiant. A smile spread across Wexler’s gaunt cheeks. “You know what? I think that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. I’ve eaten most kinds of creatures in my long years here on Earth, but I don’t believe I’ve ever tried Missing Link
foie gras
.”

He lunged at the bird but it paddled backwards. As one, the other birds went for him, but he kept chasing the goose that had pecked him. It tried to waddle away, honking in terror.

“Come here, you,” roared Wexler, a maniacal grin on his face. In the flapping melee, the hunted bird gave a frantic beat of its wings and was suddenly airborne, swooping out over the parapet and across the marsh.

“There you go,” said Wexler, watching it rise in the morning air. “Now the rest of you, get going, scram!” And he ran at them, sending the flock scrabbling for the safety of the sky. Wexler stood on the roof, a tiny receding figure as the birds soared upwards to form a ragged V.

And the flying felt sweet, an instant antidote to the panic of awakening in the body of another species. The terror subsided as each goose saw the others airborne and knew that Oriente was still intact, that his integrity might just survive this insane plan. The birds honked their pleasure, simply knowing, as Wexler had promised, where to go.

***

A soft breeze brushed the lake, ruffling the feathers of the geese, exhausted by their three thousand mile flight.

The splash of oars snapped them out of their somnolence and by the time the canoes hove into view, the birds were fully alert. The rowers lifted their paddles and coasted the last few yards to the flock. Men and birds scrutinized each other.

“It’s them, for sure,” said a boatman.

“Six geese together. Sure looks like them,” said another. “Senor Oriente? Is that you?”

The goose closest to him honked.

The men laughed, relieved. “It’s him, it’s him.” They stopped their vessels and scooped up the birds, light now after their epic journey. The geese huddled in the bilges as the rowers turned for shore.

The sun was almost down by the time they reached the muddy banks. The birds could just make out squat huts in the gloom. The shadow of a huge cathedral loomed into view, stranded on an island: Mexico City had returned to what it had once been, a series of islets threaded together by canals that bled into a vast lake, once drained by the Conquistadors then buried beneath centuries of landfill and concrete. Now the water had returned to scour away the polluted metropolis

As they neared the shore one of the rowers turned to the geese. “I'm afraid we have to put you in a net, Senor Oriente. Otherwise, it would look suspicious to have six geese sitting here, just wanting to be eaten. There are many curious eyes in the town, and the gods are vengeful in Tenochtitlan.”

The crew picked up the birds and wove their way through muddy lanes of log cabins and shabby huts. As the men passed, an old crone called out after them, “That’s right boys, let the vampires suck the souls out of the birds, not our kids.” Her bony hand made some kind of fearful, protective gesture over herself as the geese hissed and flapped at her, as though they had understood her words.

The party arrived at the vast, sagging edifice of the Conquistador cathedral, which loomed over the decrepit dwellings. Deep fissures cracked its once polished facade, earthquake wrinkles that had blown out the stained glass windows and tossed cornices into the dirt.

Inside, it was bare: the icons, crosses and paintings had been removed to the Vatican's high-security vaults during the Exodus. Any scraps left behind had been looted by the new, feral breed that inhabited the Zone: criminals dumped here by Immortals, survivors of the Pestilence herded to this vast enclosure against their will for “quarantine,” or the rare mortals who had moved here to avoid the taint of everlasting lost souls. Over the centuries the population had grown, but not by much. Disease, poverty and Lola’s simulated deities culled the population with devastating efficiency.

The men carrying the birds tramped straight to the darkest recess at the back of the cathedral, where an altar ran thick with creepers. A strangler fig had insinuated itself into the dislocated stones. Behind a massive fold of tree trunk a crevice opened, what had once been the door to a crypt. The men entered and were swallowed by an even deeper darkness. The terrified geese flapped as they brushed the cold stone walls of a staircase, then the group entered a vault half-lit by oil lanterns.

At the end of the room stood a small group of indigenous men, women and children. The boat crew dumped the netted geese nets in front of a woman of about twenty.

“It’s him,” said the lead boatman. The young woman came up and knelt in front of one of the birds, which recoiled.

The young woman reaching out a hand toward the bird’s beak. “Hello Lyle,” she said.

Fitch?
The bird attempted to speak but only a frustrated hiss emerged from its beak. Its noise was echoed by the others. The woman smiled, apparently pleased by the reaction.

“It’s him alright.” She smiled in the half light, and other figures stepped forwards to take up the birds. The young woman, lantern in hand, led the party down another passage, even deeper under the cathedral.

The walls this time were not stone but wooden planks packed against the earth: it appeared to be a recent extension to the timeless structure, a tunnel excavated below the nave. They entered a large room lit by electric lights, the first sign of modernity Oriente had spotted in this forlorn backwater. On the far side, the inert figure of a slender boy lay on a table, a few steel implements lying next to him on a scrubbed surface. It reminded Oriente of Wexler’s lab, only without the elaborate equipment. A crude theatre for the mind transfer, no doubt, but what a pitiful place it was. The birds were trembling now, hissing and beating their wings, but busy hands were reaching for them, needles plunging through the nets, and oblivion was descending.