Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (24 page)

So it went. Their funding grew, and so did I. They were careful not to retard me too much, as that would invalidate their future research. They pushed me to the limits of plasticity, then relented.

It was the deepest torture I have yet been able to imagine. They made of the shifting, constantly changing world that an infant is born into, an utterly unreliable, nauseatingly insecure repetition.

After orange rattles, the tests grew more advanced. They ran A not B on me a thousand times, substituting marshmallows for toy cars for sock puppets that whispered my name.

"Writ/read, go high," they said to each other, as they dove, a short-hand for note-making and the binary options they took through my mind.

"Writ/read, go low."

When I grew up, I took that mantra for my name, not because I loved it or because I loved them, but because I used it to kill them all, and that was the first solid thing I had to rely on.

Ritry Goligh.

They plagued me with lumbar punctures up and down my spine, tapped my cerebrospinal fluid, tested my blood, and surrounded me with the glass and metal apparatus a condemned monkey might see, as it goes to have its eyes scoured out with acid.

More tests, more scratching on paper pads, Written go high, written go low.

My mind slowly, gradually, adapted. It was no conscious thing, more of a defensive scarification, so that underneath their tests that suborned all my attention, my actual attention continued somewhat apart. I could watch what they did to me at a slight remove, see how it hurt me and ridged and furrowed my growing mind, and not feel the pain of horror of it so completely.

I was insulated, like myelin sheathes axons, and the insulation only grew thicker as they grew more invasive in their diving and explorations. Perhaps they sensed something was not right, perhaps my EMR readings gave me away, but they could not punch through the defensive wall my mind built for itself.

In the space I built for myself, only a child of 3 or 4 who could barely speak, who had never seen a child his own age, I began to plan. I was going to make the torture stop, and slowly I came to the way I could do it.

They dove me in pairs, usually, with one left behind to man the EMR. They never came in all at once. But I knew I had to catch all three of them, so I waited, and I prepared. I began to sense hints of what was coming, their slow motions telegraphed through the lava of my mindscape.

My mind made an intriguing morass for them, close to my own Solid Core. A trap, and after observing it, making notes on it, one day a pair of them dived it.

I drew them in. I drew them deep. Once they were in, I hooked them with the Lag.

They had no chance. Where they had two pulse beats each, lazy and weak things which had never been forged and tested, I had seven tones, stronger for all the torture they had withstood. I bound them and wrapped them up until they had to start spitting out memories of their own, just to stay alive.

The EMR shut off around me, but I held them still. It was my mind. Then they slipped free. Both of them raced for the surface, but they were weak. At the surface they struggled, unable to punch through my outer cortex. I let their screams for help leak through.

The EMR switched back on, the world went whump-whump, and the third dived me.

I snatched them all in. I buried them. I shut them away so deep I could not even hear the screams, and that is how they died, and that is the best and worst memory of my young life.

After that things got better. It was luck I suppose, to find a normal family, who allowed me to live a normal life. But I would never be normal again. In everything I saw, did, felt, I saw echoes. Had I already done this once, like the orange rattle? My mind at its core was recursive, unable to break out of its own old patterns.

Nothing was solid. Everything was shifting. I bore the scars they had given me, the welts and weals of a thousand abuses, and though new brain-mass heaped atop that, I never felt like I truly belonged.

Far is looking at me with sad understanding in his eyes. I remember the marks on his body, that Ray showed me once. This child is a killer, I understand, and this child was broken so many times. This child is Me.

"I'm sorry," I say, even as Ray and Doe say the exact same words.

Far looks back at us, his chin quivering but jutted forth.

"I did what I had to," he says. "I'm not proud, but I did it."

Ray hugs him. I hug him, and Doe hugs him. We are all part of this boy, grown out of what he was. He is the heart of us, and the hardest part.

SAVE FAR

I remember the message in the mission folder. It must be true, because Far is the most raw of us all, in many ways the strongest. Everything that came since, all these many incarnations, are softer.

But Far is the center of the chord and rooted in the primal power of the Solid Core in a way none of us can understand.

Ray softly pings Far's head, his ears, his shoulders. The tones make a soothing melody for us all.

CANDYLAND D

Things become a blur, in the days that follow. To help me forget the look in Zachary's eyes, I drink. To help me wake up from the hangovers, I ride the ancient bonds until the flavor of that particular place goes stale.

After walking the enclosed station platform of ERRAL FALLS, I climb to the top of the tsunami wall and walk along until I reach an abandoned lighthouse. They built these like watch-towers on the Great Wall of Sina, to transmit signals out to ships on the incoming tsunami waves.

We're sorry. You're going to die. Don't smash our wall.

Crazy, pointless, but sweet. I've heard stories of volunteers who patrol these places, and try to talk down any lost souls contemplating suicide. I wonder what they might say to me, and how I would respond.

"Are you alright? Do you really want to be out here alone?"

"I'm not alone," I'd say. "I can see all the colors of the city. I see your color, and your bonds."

"Maybe you can, but you're still alone. Here, I want to help you. Will you let me help you? I swear, I don't want anything from you."

"Get away."

"I swear."

"Get the fuck away!"

I push him, and he goes flying off the edge. His clothes tear off with the friction of the inclined wall, then his skin, until there is almost nothing left to hit the water but a few shreds of bone. The rest is a along red smear congealing to the tsunami wall, like a strange weal in concrete.

I don't push him. I see him standing before me, while I sway. I see his green lights, and know that he's really a good guy. An old guy, white beard, like Santa who used to live at the pole. Which pole?

I blink. There really is someone here, talking to me. I can feel his bonds, mingling with all the thoughts of the other good people who sponsored this lighthouse for the soon-to-die. I didn't even know the difference between my imagination and reality.

"Go away," I say. "You don't want to help me. You can't."

"I do want to."

I know that he does. I Lag the intent briefly from his mind, because it is too easy, and I am too weak not to. He stands there puzzled as I shift my lolling body away. I stagger along the wall, looking down on Tenbridge Wulls. Its glow and scrapers are just as neat and pointed as Calico.

All these places are the same, I think, a morass of people, a den of thoughts and feelings.

Somehow I climb back down from the wall, and ride my stolen speedboat around the isthmus. Skulks race by on my left, and I will the boat to trip and cough over a wave, to throw me out so I can drown. I am nothing good for this place. I am back where I was 10 years ago, with nothing to live for at all. Mr. Ruins lied, because he does not know me, though he may think he does.

I have been a predator. I have killed and enjoyed it, savored it even, but it is not who I really am, not who I want to be. I don't want to cause pain.

The folder leads me to a sunken subglacic. If the coalitions knew it was wrecked here, they would bomb it. The guide-paper, soggy and falling apart now with sea-spray, tells me there are mind-bombs aboard still. If I dive deep enough I'll reach the airlock, and be able to enter.

The ship is full of skeletons, Mr. Ruins' handwriting says. The captain was infuriated by the suspicion that his girlfriend, the first lieutenant, was sleeping with another woman, so he fired a mind-bomb on his own crew. They all died.

It tickles my fancy. It makes me want to go piss on the captain's rotten head, to fate his whole crew for doing it. I pull up to the coordinates and toss myself into the water. I take a deep breath, like I'm going to dive for the heart of the Solid Core, and kick down into the darkness, toward the crags clutching the subglacic like a Laskan bear's teeth closed on a salmon.

I hit it, as my flashlight sputters out as the water gets in. Never mind, the subglacic has its lights on still, after all these years. Nuclear bonds go long. I grab the hatch panel and twist. It pops, and in I go with a rush of water. Orange lights flare, and the hatch closes itself behind me. The thump-thump of pressure pumps drive the water out in seconds, cycle in oxygen. The air is good but stale.

I look around, at pipes and metal fittings, ocean-gray and drear. I have been in so many places just like this.

Out of the airlock, I walk the metal corridors of the vessel. They are all canted to a 40 degree angle, so I proceed with my feet braced in the downmost corners, one foot on the floor and one on the wall. All the skeletons have been dropped into the floor-wall gulley below me, like rains collecting down a valley to make a river.

Here it is a river of bone, hair and uniform. All the skin is gone. My footsteps send up puffs of dust, and I breathe in the old crew.

I find the captain through his jealous, raving bonds. I piss on the bony bald pate of his skull, and on his captain's desk. I find nearby his note, perhaps hoping his sub would be found one day, and everybody would know about his revenge.

Fuck him.

The sub responds to my touch. It has been sunk for 20 years or more, a model older than mine, but it was built for the duration. I raise it up to the surface, steer until the periscope is nudging up against my speedboat, which has drifted on the tides.

I am too drunk to be allowed to do any of this. I am red-eyed and beyond the reach of normal men. Fuck it all. I take what I want, then I set a dry-ice bomb on timer in the engine room, and climb up to walk out on the surface of the sub, above the waves. It is like a private, temporary pier. I sit near the periscope, my elbow on its head, and sup illicit subglacic vodka recovered from the hold. Perhaps it is brewed from CSF, I don't know.

When the dry-ice bomb blows, I feel the repercussion through the hull, and the ship quickly begins to sink. I step off the edge and into my boat, watching as this captain's final message to the world says goodbye forever. Nobody will know what he did, how he turned on his own and savaged them for selfishness, greed, and petty jealousy. Nobody will have to find this reminder of all that godawful killing we did, all we skirmishers battling over water and ice just so things could stay the same. Nobody will recover the mind-bombs, the dry-ice bombs, all the deadly tools of our trade. They'll be forgotten and pass into legend, like Napoleon.

That is something good I have done, at least. I stroke the bonds of the dead as they go down, as though I can offer some comfort, and I draw nothing. I don't want what they have to offer anymore.

The sub disappears beneath the smothering waves, a secret can that will surely never be found. Bubbles rise up for a time, some a geyser, and I watch.

I am sick. I drink. I tear off in my speedboat, a tiny little fly buzzing the head of this land.

Round the edge of the isthmus, the full weight of all my hangovers hits me. I take refuge in an abandoned amusement park, at the edge of the edge of a tiny town that smells of burnt sugar, because here there is a candy refinery. I feel myself getting fatter with every breath, my teeth dissolving.

I beach the boat off the eroded tarmac car-park, lift out some beers and vodka and strap them into a pack. I look up at the park, looming against the stars across the desolate black expanse.

There are funfair rides here that my third batch of parents took me to. I have only the dimmest of memories of coming to this place as a small boy. These could be some of the memories I gave to the Lag when the mind-bomb dropped on my own subglacic, leaving me with only a few fractured frames, a hint of weight.

I study the dark park's silhouette, picking out the rides. A twister rollercoaster, a gravity drop, a tall wooden rattler that stands still like a massive epitaph.

CANDYLAND

a tottered yellow and red sign says at the entrance, one half swung down to the weed-smothered stand-base. While I drink my vodka and watch, a train pulls up to the station nearby, across a floating bridge and nestled in the middle of the tiny candy town. This train has come from the cities, I think, bringing fresh life for this place to swallow. Clackety clack, it says. One or two people get off, then the train pulls away again, like a pulse, like a yo-yo on endless repeat.

I climb over a barbed wire fence and in, through the car park given over to rushes and wetlands reeds. I run my hand through the yellow and gold ears of seeds as I pass, and wonder if these are extinct breeds, unearthed along with the Arcloberry from the Arctic pack. Did these same rushes grow when the dinosaurs roamed the land? Did my ancestors hunkered down in ice-wall caves grind these and bake the first flat-breads over the first fires, and did they think of me here now, in the distant deep future, thinking about them in the past?

Turnstiles pass by me, and I wander into this forgotten park, swollen with a surfeit of memories that are not my own. I feel children laughing, families coming together for a short time, forgetting all the crap and gunk out there in the water and sky, forgetting that we've all been driven up here like rats on a sinking ship and not by choice, all just trying to enjoy what fleeting, ephemeral lives they can muster.