Xenoform (47 page)

‘I’ve got it,’ said Tec. He fished an old-fashioned key-fob out of a pocket and pointed it at the van. A circular doorway irised smoothly open without a sound. Lights came on inside the vehicle, inviting the party inside. ‘After you.’

They crammed into the van, Whistler up front, Debian beside her, Tec at the console in the back (although it was only partially functional with no main computer), Sofi, Roland and Ari on the back seats. The door silently closed behind them and the van lifted onto its cushion. Tec began to run diags on the peripheral system modules, checking that there was nothing there that could jump-start the main computer and cause the vehicle to do something rash like crashing itself.

Whistler felt the energy thrumming through the chassis, enthusing and invigorating her. ‘Let’s go get Spidey,’ she said grimly and slowly moved the controls, bringing them about.

They travelled north up Duplex and skirted the main road, running parallel through smaller streets. In some places the route was blocked by crashed pods or piles of rubble that had spilled from smashed buildings. The evidence of the greenshit corruption was all around them, blotching the city with leprous patches of infection. The changed roamed the streets unmolested for the most part, although they did see a group of young street fighters on ground trikes circling one of them like sharks, pincushioning its body with crossbow bolts. They were shouting partially-heard gang slogans as they did so.

As they passed through the Lanes and neared High Hab the marks of the greenshit became more pronounced. They stared through the translucent skin of the van, wondering how this could have happened so quickly. Cable car cables were draped with thick, vine-like fronds that hung down into the street, their gently twitching ends dangling into pools of slime. Thick drifts of greenshit were piled against walls, on roofs, on windowsills. In one large square, creepers had grown across the entire width of the space, stretching between opposing buildings, twining around ancient phone wires and utility conduits, hanging down to street level, dripping with the now ubiquitous slime.

‘Processing...’ muttered Debian. He had the gun cradled in his arms very tightly.

‘That word again,’ agreed Whistler, glancing over from the driver’s seat. ‘Processing the whole damn city.’

‘Maybe the whole planet,’ said Debian darkly. ‘For all we know.’

‘So you went into the net again,’ said Whistler. She had hardly spoken to him so far, seemingly locked in a black and contemplative frame of mind.

‘Yeah,’ said Debian slowly. He was inexplicably unsure of how much to say. ‘I spoke to the AI,’ he offered eventually.

‘Well I know that, yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. Then, when more seemed to be required, he added, ‘It does seem to be behind the GDD, as suspected. Hacked the vats.’

‘
Where did it come from? Is it alien?’ she asked, staring out at the twisted city, steering carefully around debris in the road. ‘Cos you know what this looks like, to me? Looks like we’re being fucking terraformed. Or
xenoformed
, more like.’

‘I don’t know.’ But he thought he did know. Why did it not seem right to tell her?

‘And why? Was the AI designed to do this? Why now? Why here?’

Two sides
. On one, the suggestion of unlimited ability, even power. But power over what? An entirely new world? What remained of the old one? Power for power’s own sake did have its own attraction. Had the beast done something to him, something that hadn’t shown up on any of the diags he and Tec had run, something that had made him stronger? Wasn’t that what he had ultimately been seeking all these years – power, ability? The money had just been a by-product really. But what, specifically, would be involved if he went with the AI? He was a long way from really trusting it yet – after all, it was the enemy, was it not? It certainly seemed to be killing people out on the streets. And it had essentially confessed to being behind the GDD infection, even if it had just been used as a tool by somebody else. Perhaps it was making promises that it had no intention of actually making good on – perhaps it
couldn’t
make good on them. It feared its own destruction in the coming days. Would it sacrifice Debian himself, despite its coded offers of alliance, to ensure its own existence? Had whoever created the AI been alarmed to discover that it was expanding beyond their control, hence its belief that they would betray it? Had it, in turn, been alarmed to discover that the situation it had created was expanding beyond its
own
control? Surely that was why it feared for its life, if life it was. If it wanted his help, how exactly must that help be rendered?

And on the other side – what, exactly? Choose humanity, side against the AI and somehow resist the attack that had begun – refuse, more importantly, to actively help the data monster. Could he hurt it, except by his refusal to aid it? It had effortlessly implanted the small data scrap containing the net address into his DNI memory. Surely he would be powerless to actually damage a thing like that. He felt torn, disorientated – half man and half computer already, caught on the cusp of evolution.

‘I don’t know where it came from, but it seems clear that it was made to attack us. The GDD organs affect the city while the computer problems prevent us from reacting. As for why, I don’t know that either, I’m afraid. But it fears for its own safety now, fears betrayal by its makers. Whoever they are.’

‘Hmm,’ said Whistler, guiding the van carefully up onto the pavement to avoid a patch of tree-like structures that had apparently grown straight out of the concrete. ‘You make it sound almost human.’

‘In some ways,’ he admitted, ‘it is almost human. It’s certainly sentient and intelligent in the classical sense. I never thought I would meet such an entity. Simulated intelligences, virtual beings, avatars...this thing is on another plane altogether.’

Whistler thought he sounded slightly awed. She glanced across and his eyes were distant, dreamy. He looked beautifully fragile, his slight features pale and ethereal, his unlit DNI sockets glinting in his blond hair. He could have been a delicate piece of electronic equipment himself. ‘I don’t know what’s gonna happen, Debian. But if we get Spider out and make it back to base it sounds as if you and I need to have further discussion about this.’

Her tone was odd and he wasn’t sure exactly what to read into it. Was he just being paranoid? ‘Sure,’ he said and then turned to look out of the side, hoping she would get the message and leave him alone. He really didn’t feel like talking to anybody right now.

‘I appreciate you coming with us,’ she said quietly. Debian looked back at her to see her smiling at him, but her eyes were sad in her grey face. ‘You’re a strange guy, and I still don’t really understand how you’re involved in all this. But thanks.’

‘It just seemed right,’ he found himself saying. ‘My life has suddenly become very odd after years of remaining essentially the same. I’m just trying to do what seems best, one thing at a time.’

‘Me too,’ she agreed and then she drove in silence for a while.

As they cautiously entered High Hab, passing beneath a huge, buttressed arch of ceramicarbide that served to delineate it from the Lanes, it was clear that the infection was indeed worse here, as if the warping of the city had happened around the epicentre of the barge crash, which they passed to the west of. Looking towards that demolished stretch of skyline they could see the buzzing hulks of confused gyrocopters, flying either without pilots or without their consent, launching rockets randomly into the haze that shrouded the battered streets at ground level, one of them plummeting inexplicably from the sky as they watched, to flower into a burst of flame as it hit the ground. Whistler expressed her gratitude that their course towards RPC would now begin to take them away from that terrifying focus of devastation. They headed further west into Med Hab, towards the sea and the jagged outline of the RPC headquarters itself, which jutted from the earth like a broken tooth, towering above the general hubbub of sleek, exclusive buildings, rubbing shoulders with only a few giants of equivalent size. Its shiny facade looked dull and dirty now, unlit, slab-like. It looked, reflected Debian, like a massive gravestone. He wondered how they could hope to extract Spider from there and not die trying.

The van drove unmolested through checkpoints that usually would have been well-fortified against the envious denizens of the nearby Lanes. The pillboxes were now unmanned, festooned with loops of greenshit vine, the robot sentry guns lolling lifeless on their swivel-mounts. Whistler forced aside a barrier with the armoured nose of the van and continued without speaking. Roland was carrying out last minute hardware checks on the weapons he had lent to the group, Ari occasionally offering its professional opinion, mostly ignored. Tec was running a series of basic diagnostics on the van’s weaponry, hindered by the lack of the computer. Nobody had suggested turning the automatic systems on again. Sofi was fidgeting, champing at the bit, fingers drumming on the stock of the plasma thrower.

‘Do we just roll up to the front door, then, or what?’ asked Sofi, leaning into the front of the van.

‘We’ll see,’ said Whistler. ‘I guess we keep our distance, skirt around, try to see if there’s anybody home. It all seems suspiciously quiet at the moment.’

As she said this a series of Resperi pods, travelling in a blaze of emergency lights, tore out of the building, turning onto a flyover that swooped away to the west, heading out of the city along the coast. Whistler killed the lights, nestling into the shadows at the side of the road and waited until they were out of sight.

‘They’re heading out of town,’ mused Tec. ‘I guess it’s kicking off elsewhere, too. Hopefully, we won’t find it too well-defended.’

‘Maybe they’re just running away,’ suggested Sofi.

‘Fine,’ said Roland with a grim chuckle. ‘Works for us, right?’

‘Hey, don’t they have a tunnel to the court?’ asked Tec suddenly, his face lighting up.

‘Yeah, so convicts don’t have to be moved above ground, right?’ confirmed Sofi. ‘Less chance of them making a run for it.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand – they were watering profusely. She sniffed, then saw that Tec was watching her. ‘What?’ she demanded. Tec said nothing.

‘The tunnel does exist,’ confirmed Ari, sitting up. Its eyes flickered as it scanned internal memory banks. ‘Straight from the cell level in the basement to the High Court. It might be easier to breach the court building and then enter RPC through the tunnel.’

‘I still want to look at the front door,’ insisted Whistler.

‘Is there some other way into the tunnel, besides at either end?’ asked Tec, directing the question at Ari.

‘I do have some restricted maps on file,’ admitted Ari with a touch of pride, ‘and I can demonstrate the course that the tunnel takes. Perhaps we could blast through from a sewer tunnel – there are several places where they come very close. Bit of an oversight on the part of the designers, really. Although, to be fair, there is less space available underground these days than you might imagine – the tunnel’s course seems to have been dictated by necessity. Did you know there’s actually a disused government emergency shelter nearby, under the streets?’

‘Hmm,’ grunted Sofi. ‘Fascinating, thanks. Bit of a blast from the past for you, eh, Deb – back into the sewers?’ Debian wasn’t sure whether this was an insult or not and decided not to answer. ‘Front door is sounding better all the time.’

‘We’ll take a look at the front,’ said Whistler. ‘On foot. We’ll leave the van somewhere along the most direct route home. Assuming that we’re heading home after?’ She glanced around. Nobody had a better idea. ‘Good. Let’s ditch it on the main road – run it up on the pavement, maybe throw some rubbish over it or something. Hope the greenshit doesn’t eat it up before we get back.’

‘Bet you wish you’d let me fix the camo-projector now,’ said Tec pointedly.

‘I have a projector,’ offered Ari. ‘It can be detached and just plugged into your vehicle. Uses a bit of juice, though – it’s a military model.’

‘Yeah, do it, Ari,’ ordered Roland.

‘Okay,’ said Whistler. ‘Let’s do that. We’ve plenty of power.’ She coasted the van round onto the main road, wedging it as far into the shadows of a corner between two buildings as possible while Ari performed surgery on itself, extracting the small sphere of the projector from its body and plugging it into one of the van’s power outlets.

They disembarked in an atmosphere heavy with foreboding, pulling their hats down tight onto their heads. The stink of the greenshit was almost unreal, although the nasal plugs filtered most of it out – one just didn’t seem to get used to it with exposure – and the dust was thick in the air. Sticky puddles of slime marred the roadway like sores. The shambling silhouettes of GDD victims could be seen lurching slowly along the streets, thankfully ignoring the group for now. Nobody else was around.

Debian emerged from the circular hatch and stared at the spot where he knew the van to be. It was virtually invisible except for the slightest peripheral shimmering if you tried to catch it out of the corner of your eye. He extended a hand slowly and felt its smooth, cool skin where there looked to be only empty air. Who the hell was this guy Roland, to have the equipment he had exhibited? How well did Whistler actually know him?

‘For fuck’s sake everyone remember where it is,’ said Whistler.