Hammerjack (12 page)

Microtrodes sprouted from both of his temples, his body still except for the sporadic twitch. He was in his command chair, stubble and sweat covering his face. Occasionally a smile would poke through the grime, like the earliest forms of life crawling from a primordial soup—with it, a sudden bloom in his cheeks that was the only break in his comalike pallor. He had been riding the domain hard.

Dex could just as easily have watched from outside, but after the encryption algorithms split, he wanted to get up close and personal. He had been hooked into the node ever since. Seated in front of the rows of consoles in his office, he looked something like a sacrifice to a great pagan deity. The only window into the machinery was the virtual display, which hovered over Dex and showed the steady but fading throb of his vitals. All the meaty stuff from the extraction was being fed directly into his synapses.

And it was as if God had opened the floodgates of Heaven.

Dex had been expecting some serious mischief, but nothing like this. An entire universe had been encapsulated inside Zoe’s body—not some slate of industrial secrets, but ribbons of light consisting of an infinite number of points, connected to each other in an eternal matrix of flawless arrangements. As soon as the mathematical barriers fell, Dex had found himself on the outer rim of those lights, floating freely in space and searching for his point of origin. He found it behind him: a tumbling series of morphing shapes casting out waves of partial reality like the regular pulse of a neutron star. It was a representation of the node, the only beacon he had to find his way back. Dex waited what he thought was a reasonable amount of time—though there was little to distinguish between minutes and hours in this place—looking for any signs that the node would collapse. But his connection to the outside world remained strong enough to give him confidence, and from there it was just a matter of him taking the plunge.

The points of light beckoned him.

Dex moved into the matrix, toward one of the interconnecting conduits. It glowed, fiercely blue, like the fiber optics that had drawn flash from Zoe’s body. Dex thought he could feel a presence when he drew closer—as if a force of life had made its own impression, as if blood was moving through those veins instead of energy. At first he was certain it was Zoe herself, a prospect that was at once both terrifying and beguiling. Those two magnetic extremes pulled on him and pushed against him, creating turbulence as he reached the conduit.

Dex sensed it brushing against him, like heat from the embers of a dying fire, gradually building in intensity until all at once it
became
him. It wrapped itself around his consciousness like waves slipping over the head of a drowning man, but without pain or panic. By now Dex welcomed it, and reveled in the acceleration as currents took him downward, pulling him deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Instantaneous transport across limitless space. He saw the world expanding and contracting—an oscillating universe of birth and death, matter and destruction. The lights coalesced into flashes and images, the faces of people both familiar and unrecognizable, before breaking down into their base elements. Hydrogen and helium. The building blocks of fusion. Nuclear fire. Then deeper still, down to the subatomic level. Electrons moving in perfect circles, spinning around dense nuclei like planets orbiting a sun. Dex shot toward one of them on a relativistic trajectory, punching through the outer walls until he found himself dancing among the quarks.

Existence at its most regressive level. All reality mapped down to the smallest detail. The very fabric of the cosmos.

Dex was seeing it, but hardly believing it. That all this could be encoded into flash was beyond staggering, but he simply could not grasp the reason for it. He had witnessed the wonder of creation, and now he was asking why.

The pressure of his arrival began to build. It did not reach a crescendo so much as deposit Dex on a plateau, a solid ground of substance from which he could watch the show. Whether or not he wanted to watch was entirely up to him.

Dex froze. He glanced upward, searching for the star that was the anchor to his own mind as it still existed in the outside world. He found the node precisely where he left it—steady, unwavering, still visible even after the big tumble. He had not moved so far from himself as he imagined. But even if he had, he doubted he would have stopped.

All right, baby,
he thought.
Now’s the time. Show me what you got . . .

The quarks parted. Impossible darkness came down in a torrent—impossible because Dex could still see, and as he moved between shadows of organic dust he could finally accept that he was not alone. There
was
life there—amorphous, shifting, creating forms that seemed more imagination than real—but that was the whole point, wasn’t it? After all, there was no atomic structure for

intelligence

because it existed on a plane all its own. There was no construct, no representation to accurately depict it. It simply
was,
and that left Dex to fill in the gaps for himself.

Out of that confusion, he understood.

Cray . . .

It was only the briefest of flickers, barely marking the distance between axon and dendrite. By the time it ended, Dex became aware that the plug had been pulled. Somewhere, in the recesses of his own memory where things like mortality were buried, he could see the node fading. Twisting shapes grew smaller and smaller until they finally fell out of space, closing the door on what he had left behind. His body was disconnected now, and it wouldn’t be long until his mind went the same way.

It was a pity, really.

He had so been looking forward to letting Cray in on the joke.

Dex lingered on for a while in dream time, then collapsed in on himself.

Flatline.

Heartbeat ceased instantly after Phao Yin terminated the interface, but Dex Marlowe barely reacted to the end of his life. His hands became slightly rigid, then relaxed when he stopped breathing. In many ways, Yin thought, it was a peaceful and enviable death.

He stood over Dex for another five minutes, watching the EEG as it skipped up and down a few times, then settled.

What,
he wondered when it was finished,
did you see in there?

Doubtless the same things Zoe had seen during her brief foray into the same territory. Yin walked over to the glass sarcophagus where she still lay, her remains neatly preserved in suspension. The fiber optics had since been disconnected, allowing her to float freely in the clear solution, her body encased in pale blue light. As she was, she could have remained indefinitely—an artifact of sorts, announcing the arrival of a brave new world. But Yin would not allow it. Zoe was a liability, even in death.

He found the controls on the pedestal of the extraction tank, disengaging the preservation mode and flooding the tank with an accelerant solution. The chemicals, in conjunction with the elements already present in Zoe’s body, worked quickly. As Yin stood by, her skin began to break down—peeling away from the flesh beneath, then dissolving into the liquid. Muscle tissue followed. Less than fifteen minutes passed, and all that remained was a skeleton. Yin finished by subjecting the bones to ultrahigh-frequency sound waves, which pulverized them into microscopic fragments.

Ashes to ashes,
he thought.

Yin flushed out the tank. He then went back to the node console, pushing Dex Marlowe’s body out of the command chair and taking the seat for himself. As he guessed, Dex still had the extraction data in the active buffer. Yin punched up a model of the data, making sure there had been no transcription errors. Satisfied the product was still in good shape, he dumped all the files into a secure directory. The transfer was so massive it took hours, but Yin was patient. He wasn’t at all concerned about Dex’s murder. After he had put everything in order, nobody else would be either.

When the process was complete, Yin purged the node of all data and shut it down. Getting up to leave, he noticed for the first time that Dex’s eyes were still open. They had been staring at him the entire time—strangely cognizant, even though the light behind them was gone. In a way, Yin was envious. Dex had caught a glimpse of the future.

A glimpse of the Ascension.

Cray took breakfast in the Korso mostly to kill time, having spent most of the night in a futile chase of sleep. It was only when his coffee and pastry were on the table that he realized his stomach had joined the rest of his body in rebellion and was steadfastly refusing anything that came close to solid food.

Weird the way that works,
Cray pondered, toying with the croissant on his plate.
You can kill a man and not even blink, but the tiniest thing spooks you and everything shuts down.

The coffee he gulped burned the back of his throat. “You think too goddamned much,” he muttered to himself.

But not enough to get a handle on what was
really
playing him. Cray supposed it could have been Avalon herself, and that prophetic way she had of speaking—but he was more convinced it was what she represented. Up until yesterday, there was nothing in his life that went far beyond his experience. Meeting her had changed all that. Her eyes had seen things that he could not possibly imagine—as far away as Olympus Mons, as close as across the street. Cray had never even considered that he had drawn a line between himself and those things, much less that he would ever cross it. Yet here he was, about to do just that—and he was afraid that when he saw what was on the other side, he wouldn’t know how to deal with it.

So if you’re that scared, why don’t you just run? You could disappear. You’ve done it before. Maybe find a little redemption.

But that wasn’t how it worked. There were claws, and they had a deep hold of his mortal coil—he understood that as much as he understood they would never let go. And the days of worrying about his immortal soul hanging in the balance, those had long since passed. It already belonged to the Collective. Cray had signed the papers and closed the deal himself.

He finished off the rest of his coffee, strolling out into the lobby and taking in the business-as-usual vibe like a good shot of stim. Outside, daylight filtered through the cold, gray clouds that had been dumping rain on Oldtown for the last few hours. Along the Operngasse a steady parade of umbrellas sidestepped puddles and autocabs as they hurried on to whatever appointments awaited. The opera house loomed over them, its ornate windows outwardly keeping watch but allowing nothing in. The people inside were monitoring him even now—that much he knew from what Avalon said. But to Cray, it seemed the place itself was keeping a close eye on him.

He tied his overcoat at the waist and tailed a small group of businessmen who were heading across the street. He followed at a distance, hanging back a few meters and watching how they passed through the security checkpoints. The human element was conspicuously absent, guards eschewed in favor of sentry clusters. Cray noted the small pods, spaced at regular intervals on the face of the wall, each one containing cameras that followed everyone from the street all the way to the front door. That meant there were at least half a dozen other devices he
couldn’t
see, most of them weapons, already locked on his position.

Cray felt a tingle when he passed through the outside perimeter—probably rain playing havoc with the ECMs. The interference, however, didn’t provide enough cover to hide the one piece of contraband Cray carried on his person. By the time he reached the entry point, threat sensors were actively pinging him and setting off alarms. As expected, two conspicuously armed guards appeared and put up an intimidating front, one standing in front of him while the other circled behind.

“Morning, gents.”

“Sir,” the one in front of him said, “please remove any electronic devices you have on your person and take a step back.” He emphasized the point by placing a hand on his weapon. The one behind already had his drawn.

“Relax, fellas,” Cray told them. “The name’s Alden. Check the roster—my clearance comes straight from GenTec.”

“I don’t care if your clearance comes straight from Jesus Christ,” the guard replied, and nodded to his partner. The one in back grabbed Cray by the coat and stuffed his face into the nearest convenient wall, then patted him down while the other guard kept him covered. It didn’t take them long to come across the MFI.

The guard took it out of Cray’s coat, treating the device like it was a chunk of pollex explosive. “What
is
this?” he demanded.