Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “That would come later,” the ghost said, exhaling again. Her heels click clacked against the asphalt. “After Gethsemane. After things got bad. It’s funny, really. She couldn’t crack the secret of immortality until she got her hands on Vai bodies and discovered how they lived, but by then, everything she loved was dead. Tragic.”

  “I’m so sad,” spat Natalie.

  The ghost stopped where the shops ceded to skyscrapers, where the river was slowly rising into the broken streets. The smell of rot and mold was strong here, of dead fish and garbage in the water. She looked wistful. “I don’t think so.”

  Natalie stopped. The wind kicked up around her, bringing in stinging sand from the uplands deserts. “You agree—God, of course you agree, you’re her fucking notes.” She breathed out, rubbing her temples. “I’m not going to argue with a fucking notepad.”

  “That’s probably wise. It’s almost morning. You probably have time for one or two more questions before they wake you.”

  And Natalie had questions—so many, about the braingear Sharma had stolen, about how the nanotech was developed in the first place, about how the tattoos worked, about how Sharma linked the Vai weaponry into her memoria, about how she discovered she could upload and supplant the master node, about all her years of quiet, heads-down labor in the service of her secrets. She could have, but her mouth was stuffed with a far more important mystery.

  “How did I not remember, if it wasn’t actually taken by the Heart?”

  The ghost took one more long drag and exhaled a gray cloud of smoke that spun in the streetlights. “The human brain is a marvelous organ. Sharma studied it intently. Some people live their trauma in remarkable detail every day until they die. Others block it out so completely they might have had it ripped out by a molecular.” She offered Natalie the cigarette. “But it’s always waiting for you. Always there. She knew that intimately.”

  Natalie took the cigarette. Spun it in her fingers. She’d never held something so expensive. She lifted it to her lips and took a small huff. Her mind filled with thoughts of dead forests and dried farms. The bright, peaceful songs of undead birds.

  “I was happy before I forgot,” she said.

  “Were you? Really?”

  She eyed the ghost. “Oh, great, now the notepad’s a therapist.”

  “I’m only saying that she went ahead despite it all.”

  “Is that your advice?”

  “Heavens, no. I’m not coded to give you advice. I’m coded to give you this.” The ghost reached into her jacket, and then offered an old-style red access card, the kind that used to be used in the Verdict building. It had been scrawled over with black marker in C-kalibre, the coding language used by most Auroran systems.

  “What’s this?”

  “Partition access,” she said. “It’s what Sharma wanted you to have. You’ll be able to use it to get back into the Vaispace through Solano’s device when you’re ready, then back out without him being able to control you. You’ll get one shot, because his secondaries will lock up the exits when they figure out what you’ve done. This access will lead you to Ashlan. Sharma meant to save her, not lock her up. She was going to use it herself, but you can’t help her now. You need a body to return to.”

  Natalie licked her lips. “And when I wake up, it’ll still be with me?”

  “It’s lodged in your memoria. It’ll auto-activate the next time you go in. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “Like the trauma. Ha.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Natalie caught the morning chill with one last, long breath, then tossed the cigarette into a puddle. Had this end always been waiting for her? Her mother took the long walk not once but twice—away from Verdict, then away from Twenty-Five. Natalie had taken the same two walks, and neither of them had escaped the pain that held them down. Natalie was more like Sharma than she thought she was, more like her than she wanted to be. And she’d spent her life running away—

  —yet everything had just led her back here, to her past, as the sun slowly crept over the horizon.

  Maybe there’s a long walk back.

  “I know what I’m up against now,” she said, watching the aching edge of the morning light up her ghost-mother’s chin. “It’ll be different this time. Solano’s no alien. He’s no god. He’s just a man.” She tipped her chin toward the sky, and took one long, last drag of the dead world. “And you can kill a man.”

  Natalie shivered in the cold, feeling reborn.

  The doctor smiled, with teeth too straight and white to have ever lived on Earth. “That’s my girl,” she said, and—

  —and Natalie felt the pop of instruments being removed from her body, the crashing ocean of the reintegration drugs, and the flickering of the lights of the logic tower, and the dragging scream of reality as someone brought her back to Vancouver.

  25

  Natalie emerged from Ingest with a tearing, ripstop headache, famished and shaking. Her body ached. She felt overwhelmed with grief over a tower and the click of a shut door and a figure receding down a staircase, and hidden anger hit her like an avalanche. She tasted blood and smoke, followed by a caustic black stink she recognized from the last time she’d been in the same room as melting plasteel. Burning plasteel meant bulkheads melting, or the computer core frying—whatever it was, she had to get out.

  But she couldn’t move. Her limbs felt bruised and leaden, and her skin hung loose and wrong on her bones. She smelled something base and organic, something just around the corner from dirt and sweat and rot. She didn’t have time to wonder what it was before the intravenous line was pulled from her skull with a bloody pop.

  Ward appeared nearby, ripping the haptics from her fingers and toes. His jacket lay akimbo on his shoulders, the gravving on his hair unspooling, sweat slicking his temples. She felt her heart constrict.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “You have to disconnect the captain, get her out of here—”

  He cut her off. “Stop writhing. Unless you want brain spatter on the floor.”

  “And then I need to get to a shuttle,” she said. Her throat felt sliced by glass, and she grasped at her neck with one newly freed hand. There was something she needed to do right fucking now, a thought that was evaporating like a dream after waking. “I can beat him, Ward. I—I have an idea. I forgot. We can make him forget. Them. We can—”

  Words were too slow. She needed to be up and moving fifteen seconds ago, but she was half-blind, and the master node still hadn’t shown up, and had she lost him in the upload? Panic spiked. Where are you? she thought. I think I can do it—I can get you back to your ship, we can use the Heart, you can leave with your people—

  And she felt the master node’s sudden hot breath in her ear. And what would happen to you?

  I’d—She paused. I’d forget, of course.

  Would you forget me?

  She opened her mouth to answer, and the only thing that came out was an overwhelmed howl.

  Ward fumbled at the last few proxy connections with the technique of a frightened raccoon. “You’re overclocking. Calm down.”

  “I thought you left,” she whispered.

  “I did leave. You need to calm down. You can’t beat him. Nobody can beat him now.”

  “I tell you, I can.”

  His shoulders tightened, and he grabbed her wrist. She felt his perfect crescent nails skimming the clotting wound there, and winced. “I’m not doing anything for you. Not anymore. I’m in a stupid place right now with Mr. Solano, and it is literally your entire fault. You knew the whole time that I was dying. You knew he had a cure. You could have told me that back in my room, before you fucked me, before you sent me away, but you needed something out of me. I should have kept my boundaries exactly where they were and not let you in.”

  “Emerson—”

  But he was already pulling away, looking up at someone else, hiding her open eyes with his skinny torso. “She’s overclocking for su
re.”

  The realization came too late: there had been more than one pair of hands.

  Ward wasn’t alone.

  She went limp, hoping it wasn’t too late to salvage the situation. She’d never heard overclocking applied to a brain before, but knowing what she knew now about what had brought her to this moment, it made a sick sort of sense. Of course her brain was doing too much. She’d been uploaded to an alien world through a piece of technology that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist, and forced to remember a trauma that she’d voluntarily forgotten. Her brain was so slow, so slow, like a starship burning itself blind to escape the accretion disk of a black hole.

  She felt the master node nearby and the warmth of his not-body kneeling close. You can get me back in.

  To a partition.

  An imperceptible nod. The long walk. A lie.

  Natalie ached. What? She hauled in a breath, and the pain, the pain. I’m not lying about this.

  The long walk never ends.

  She couldn’t see him—couldn’t see anything, really—through her blurred vision, through the heat bath of the computer core, a sudden and soiled midsummer afternoon.

  It did. A long time ago. Fuck. Tears. It’s the last walk you take in the city when you’re heading to list up with the corporations, and the indenture afterward. It ends.

  It hasn’t for you, the master node said, retreating slightly. And it does not matter. If I take my fleet and my people and I leave, you’ll pursue us to the end of time. The long walk never ends.

  There are people who want peace, she said. I’m one of them now. You see that people can change.

  Yes, said the master node.

  His fingers danced against her cheek.

  But humans lie.

  Someone else was talking now, someone bombastic and familiar. The figure was too round to be Ward, the hair too intricately piled in curls too delicate to accomplish on one’s own. His ring-laden fingers twirled a bloody rag. “Just give me the needle, Mr. Ward. We don’t have time to call the tattooist. She’ll get a couple ragged lines and be happy with it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said another voice. Ascanio, hanging around somewhere out of sight, like she always did.

  The man with the rag tossed it at her, grazing her open mouth. She smelled iron and perfume before it slipped off her face and fell to the floor. She kept silent, her eyes closed. No need to let the others know she was awake before she knew more about the situation.

  “I thought this rig was ready to go,” he said.

  “It is, sir,” Ward said, faint and uncertain.

  The man spoke with a disappointed, sour edge. “She’s unresponsive.”

  “Sir, she’s just—”

  “I do not wish to be unresponsive, Mr. Ward.”

  She slit her eyes. Golden tattoos climbed his neck, shimmering in the keen lab light like they were alive. In his right hand was the Company key, embedded in the large ring he was always wearing. Ah, she thought, yes.

  “I’ll show you responsive when I get out of here,” she said, when her tongue returned to her. “Joseph.”

  His first name. Like he was an indenture.

  Just to watch him squirm.

  It was as if she could truly see Solano for the first time. All of the things that had made Joseph Solano imposing—the historical function of his hairstyle, the thick lines of his eyeshadow, the dramatic way he was lit for announcements, his thick vein-blue manicure—melted away at her disrespectful address, leaving only the shine of greed in his brown eyes.

  “Mr. Ward,” he said, and turned toward the younger man. Her ex shifted from his left foot to his right like a walking prevarication. “Suggestions?”

  Ward stammered. “We can—ah, we can run some cables to the bridge and hook her body in directly, if you’re really concerned about having both her and Ingest in the same room.”

  “Make it happen,” he said, wringing the rag around his silver-flecked fingers. Natalie noticed some movement at the back of the room; a group of stone-still indentures moved immediately toward the door. “Damn. We were doing it all wrong before.”

  Natalie stared at Ward, trying to communicate her true feelings through eyes gone blade-hard. You asshole. You heel-licker. You total fucking sociopath. It made her feel better to go through the entire library of creative invectives in her head as she forced her fingers back into her skin, as she recovered her strength. And even those felt wrong, stretched and bruised, like her body wasn’t even hers. Like it hadn’t been for some time.

  “Ah, um. To a point, sir,” Ward said. “If you want to keep the wetworks functioning, it seems to me that we should install an advanced life-support system. More than just the improvised versions we have now. The Vai don’t honestly care about their wetworks, and obviously, neither did Dr. Sharma or the Society, so one example isn’t enough. If we want to preserve that aspect of, um—us—we need better aftercare ideas. Which won’t happen in the twenty minutes you’ve given us.”

  “Twenty minutes is what you have. The ships are on their way.”

  Ward shifted from foot to foot. “I think it would be to Aurora’s disadvantage to lose you permanently because of shoddy implementation.”

  Solano stared at him. “Are you saying you’re going to do a subpar job, Mr. Ward?”

  “N-no, sir—”

  “There you go, then.” With that, the CEO had switched his gaze to Natalie, crossing his arms as if he weren’t even listening to Ward. Natalie felt increasingly filthy as he looked at her, as he examined her, like a doll or a broken pod. She tried to pick herself up, but her limbs were sloughed and leaden. She was no longer tied down, but without luck and a shot of adrenaline, she wasn’t going anywhere. Fuckers, she thought. Where the hell is the master node?

  “So, what did you think of the party?” Solano asked. “The city?”

  “Trash,” she croaked.

  “It wasn’t quite like I remembered.”

  “Nothing ever is.”

  He chuckled. “They never tell you the truth,” he said. “They never tell you that’s as good as it gets.” He picked up a squat syringe of a sort that Natalie barely recognized, needle-sharp and golden. He slipped out a canister, turned to Kate—unconscious now, her head lolling as far as the cords wrapped around it would let her—and, like filling water from a spigot, squeezed out a mouthful of red-gold blood, slipping it back into the device like a magazine into a gun grip.

  “You can’t,” she said. “I’m a citizen. I can refuse medical treatment—”

  He laughed. “This isn’t medical treatment. It’s proprietary technology needed to fly Auroran ships. You’ll find that the only people able to refuse are those of us who have truly earned it.” He tipped the syringe down to her arm.

  She squirmed. “You gonna tell me how you recoded Sharma’s nanotech?”

  Solano turned away from her, his golden tattoos catching in the light, at his neck, at his fingers, shimmering underneath his fingernails. His aides moved around him like pale crows. “How does anyone do anything in this world? Spies, a shitload of resources, and a bunch of really smart scientists.”

  “Oh, my God, you think the superhaptics you built in a month on a dead woman’s blood are—are going to stand against her work of twenty years?”

  “Aurora builds to win,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

  Cit seccers stepped forward, taking the syringe out of Solano’s hand. The contents glittered cash-gold, and the heat of the room pressed in on her bare arms. She sucked air into her lungs, seeking out Ward. He stood in the back, his chest stirring shallowly, his entire body saying don’t move, don’t move, they can’t notice you if you don’t move.

  “Em,” she said, feeling the prick of the needle, the warmth of the silent gold, the sob of the master node hidden somewhere—how would this affect him? Is he dying? Shit—“You know what this is, Em. Ingest. The superhaptics. He’s never going to give you a cure. He’s going to line you up for this as soon as I die. You’re next up.
Em—he’s going to control everything—”

  Ward looked away.

  Solano stepped forward. Seemed to consider this. The smell of blood soaked the air between them. “You’re not going to die. I’m not a monster, Natalie.”

  “No. You’re an executive.”

  “You say that like it’s the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  The silver had felt like an invader, the master node like a thief in the night. Solano had stolen from her, then tossed in the match to burn the house down. “You need us,” he said, watching her, as if he could see the gold rush through her body, pump through her heart, convert the walls of her capillaries.

  “People need freedom.”

  “Freedom is starvation. Freedom is constant war. I know this intimately. I haven’t made a single decision for myself since I walked out of that garden party.” He snapped at someone in the background. “There are so many ways to starve.”

  “You always looked happy from where I stood.”

  “So did you.” His mouth curved into a smile. “You liked your compartment. You liked our praise. You worked hard for that praise. You cleaned the toilet, puffed the pillows, stocked drinks in the cooler for when Mr. Ward came over. You were proud and happy.”

  Happy. Had she been happy? Didn’t she love the white walls, the schedule, the booth in the lounge, the way she’d open her arms against the leather back, opening her chest to the thrill of alcohol in the air, the feeling of a citizen’s clothing on her skin? Hadn’t she been happy? Hadn’t she been—

  —so fucking happy she’d cry, that her sheets would be drenched in sweat every morning, that she’d vomit from the stress of going from taking orders from genial Kate Keller to running a department of people who’d rather stab her in the back than listen. So fucking happy that she’d walked straight into an enemy camp and vaporized people just like her, citizens and indentures who had the fucking temerity to have signed with another company in their search for comfort, and a better life. So fucking happy that she’d built the framework that made it happen, hadn’t even questioned it.