Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Not your fault, she wanted to remind herself.

  Even though it was.

  “I was happy,” she lied.

  He swept his arm to the right. “Mining. Janitorial. It’s all such a terrible waste. So the indentured body will work in the world, doing exactly what we need it to do, while the mind lives in the city, messing around or doing crafts or whatever you’d like to do. There’ll be computational work, of course—”

  “And I suppose we’re supposed to be eternally grateful.”

  “But isn’t this what your sort wanted, back in Verdict?” He peered at her. “An equal world, where everyone can live as beautifully, as grand as any executive? You can have that now.” He paused. Raised his voice. “You can all have it. All of you.”

  “It won’t be real.”

  He turned, adjusting his coat as he walked out of the room. “After a few days, my dear, you won’t care. Have her up on the bridge in ten minutes, please.”

  She cast a glance around at the room as the door shivered closed. He’d left behind four guards, burly men she could probably take in a fight one-on-one, but not all four at once, and certainly not with boltguns. Ward looked away, down at his drawer. Ascanio motored away toward storage, as if she could remove herself from her complicity in this bullshit simply by looking elsewhere.

  Kate unconscious—

  Her brain threw out plans. This wasn’t over. If she could get a boltgun from one of the guards, she could get out of here—

  Node, she whispered. Get the fuck up. Make yourself useful for once. I’m about to punch some assholes in the face and I need you to watch out for me so we don’t die.

  I’m running simulations.

  The master node’s shoulders shuddered.

  For when we get back inside.

  When I figure out how to beat him.

  How much time it’ll take to reintegrate.

  If I can reintegrate.

  Well, that’s just stupid of you to say. Of course you can.

  I’ve been alone, he said.

  I would be coming back from the dead.

  I would not be the same person.

  She made a fist, stared at the roaming cords in the ceiling, at the familiar breadth of server and interface and the unfamiliar curve of Vai cord. Of course it’s possible. I’m doing it.

  I’m not the same. I have limits.

  Don’t tell Solano that. You know, she said, after a long moment. I really doubt they’d use their boltguns in here. These assholes are cits, but this equipment isn’t easily replaceable. As long as I keep them away from Kate …

  She heard a deep sigh.

  I’ll do what I can.

  Natalie groaned. Tightened every part of the body that could—arms, legs, cold heart—and grabbed the sides of the gurney, swinging her feet around to the floor with what little control was left to her. The guards approached immediately. The master node fed her an attack plan, and Natalie made short work of the first two. The remaining man had the advantage of height but, by then, Natalie had the advantage of pure rage. Her fist came into contact with the man’s jaw, and he staggered back. She pushed forward through the jagged stiffness that was left, advancing—

  And then she felt the rattle of a boltgun, took the discharge of a stun-shot impact under her right shoulder, heard the crack of her lowest rib. She stumbled back against the gurney, her muscles bowing out, her breath seizing, dragging herself up to turn and face the shooter. A guard neither she nor the master node had seen emerged from behind a logic tower, and she swept up the first guard’s lost boltgun with her left hand, shooting him in the head. He sagged back, still breathing. Low setting. Probably some brain damage.

  He deserved it.

  She waved the boltgun and stumbled back into the logic tower where Kate resided, using it to keep her more upright than she felt she could be. She hadn’t expected Ward to help her, or Ascanio, but they were cowering behind an interface, and somehow that made it worse.

  “Come on, you two,” she screamed. “Help.”

  Ascanio pushed up with two hands. She was wearing a dark blue suit with different cit tags. Yet another promotion for those who kiss ass. “You don’t know,” she said. “They—they are. You—you don’t know. Any damage you do to yourself right now is permanent. You won’t heal. You’re too far gone. Just stop. S-stop.”

  “Too far what—”

  “Look at yourself.”

  And she did. The gray pallor, the failing eyesight, she was just tired—“I’m fine.”

  “No,” she said, quietly. “Really look.”

  Ward turned away.

  And she knew she shouldn’t, but the aching discomfiture, the feeling that something was terribly wrong, just increased, and this time she took it all in for what it truly was—the slight stinking edge, the tightness in her joints, the graying in her hands. The wetworks, Ward had said. Her wetworks. She’d seen this before, at the end of the battlefield, in the bodies that lay there—

  “This isn’t possible,” she whispered.

  It was Ward’s turn to emerge from his hiding spot, and his hands grabbed at the interface as if for support. “That’s what I was trying to tell Mr. Solano,” he said, and his voice was infinitely kinder than it had ever been, and she hated him for it. “You—tested this for him, in a way, when you connected. Now we know what happens. That is—ah, that you die, and that you come back, ah. Different. Mx. Ascanio, we’ll need a ventilator sent to the bridge—two, if you can get them—”

  Natalie knew the blank feeling that rolled in was shock—if that was a feeling at all, and not old feedback from the memoria. She was just inhabiting her body, just pasted to her heart and her nerves, a walking thing that used to be a woman. She’d been dead for an hour, her consciousness severed by the Ingest upload, her mind stapled to her body by the memory device. She’d been dead, but her body and mind remembered, and perhaps that’s why the memory device was keeping her here. She almost couldn’t speak. She stared at her hands, and the room spun around her, a wild anger building from—God, she thought, is this anger real or is this all just a memory—

  —what would happen if I took off the memoria now?

  Is that all I am now? Coded memories?

  Shock turned to anger, and she snarled at Ward. “Fuck your I didn’t know. Is that all you are? Some shit that shuffles around and does what they say and thinks they have a choice. You’re okay with this? Ward—”

  He shuffled his feet. His jaw wavered. “I’m not okay.”

  “Ward. What did they ask of you?”

  “Don’t tell her anything, Mr. Ward,” said Ascanio.

  “I have to be okay with it. I have to be okay. I have to.”

  The words had the forced cadence of a mantra. He shuddered; his hand hovered in front of his face for a moment, and then he stopped resisting the habit and drew it through his gravved-up hair. The overhead lights caught the edge of something long and bright and silver-gold just under his hairline, of broken, burnt skin, bloody around the edges, an expanse she hadn’t seen until now. It had the look of the info-implants she’d seen on nearly everyone else, except this time she could get closer, and see the light peeking at the edges—

  “Ward,” she whispered. “When did you get a memory device?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Natalie grabbed at his hand, leaned forward, alarmed, repeated the question as if it were lined with daggers, with poison, with murderous intent. “When did you get a memoria?”

  He blinked and pulled back. “It’s not a memoria, it’s the info-implant for interacting with the superhaptics. The one you asked me to get—”

  “Show me,” whispered Natalie.

  “You’re scaring me.”

  Natalie’s breath came in nervous little spurts. She stared—the install was haphazard, of course, performed by some neurocit who couldn’t have known what they were doing, someone who had perverted Reva Sharma’s Sacramental intentions; his skin puckered pat
chy and dark around the circle where someone had fit the memory device over his normal info-implant. He took it off, turned it over, handed it to her.

  “It’s for the superhaptics,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “That’s definitely a memoria,” whispered Natalie, weighing it in her hand. “Next-gen. But why would they do that? You’re not dead, or in a coma—”

  The ship shivered around them, as if it were laughing—

  —laughing at her—

  “I, uh,” said Ascanio. “I had mine installed last week. You can check that one, too.” She’d pulled herself out from behind the interface. Her face was lined with nervous energy; her body thrummed with it. And Natalie was about to turn to accept her help when she saw it: the quiet little click from Ascanio to something else. One millisecond, she saw Ascanio’s bright eyes; the second, something broken and cartoonish.

  “If you’re going to do this,” Ascanio said in a cadence that wasn’t her own, “pick somewhere farther away from Ingest, mm?”

  She’s going to—

  Natalie!

  screamed the master node.

  Ascanio launched at Natalie, and without the master node’s warning it would have been the last thing she’d expected her former tech to do. Ascanio was not a fighter, but this was not Ascanio. The gait was wrong. The fight was short and violent, and ended with Natalie’s fist breaking Ascanio’s nose, a spray of blood, and a cracking noise as Natalie pushed her into a table, insensate.

  Ward was nearby in seconds, sweeping up the gun she’d used. “What the fuck was that?”

  Natalie saw the master node in the corner of her eye and sent him a grateful nod. “Not Ascanio. Give me the gun.” She leaned over to check Ascanio’s fluttering pulse, but Ward didn’t move. “Ward, give me the boltgun.”

  “I—I—” Ward’s face looked chalk-white, and his jaw wavered, wordless, a few times. His eyes watered and his knees shook, like he was fighting something with every muscle he had. His hand was sweaty and unpracticed where it held the boltgun, and he raised it, slowly, examining it with a sudden horror in his eyes, like it was some kind of hot coal or his own beating heart. “I don’t think I can,” he said.

  “Give me the gun,” she whispered. “Switch it off, or whatever, just—”

  “I think—”

  “The gun, Ward!”

  She could tell he had figured it out when he turned the barrel toward his own body, his face, looked down the darkness like it was some sort of beacon. “I should have read the contract, right?” he said.

  She stumbled toward him, her fingers desperate to grab the weapon, to pull it away, but she was too late. She saw the switch in his eyes, too, a beat where anguish ceded to anger, and the motion of someone else sweeping in to occupy the space behind his eyes. She saw the silent petition of his finger pulling the trigger, and he fell to the ground, a half-breathing insensate sack of meat—

  For a moment, she was too shocked to move.

  And then she was on her knees, grabbing at his clothing, shoving her fingers against his neck in search of a pulse. He was alive—and before she could reach for a first aid kit, Ascanio was pulling herself up, wiping at her nose. “Ms. Chan, we’ve dispatched cit sec. Please stop making problems for everyone around you.”

  “Sorry,” she said, hovering there, staring at the bleeding Ward. She recognized the cadence of Ascanio’s borrowed voice now. Knew who it was. “I—I’m just doing what you told me to do.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m going down screaming.”

  The doors opened with a curt swish, divesting six more members of citizen security, new men smelling of uniform soap, their arms and legs in eerie sync, each of them now wearing a memoria and a jack at the back of their neck. She scrambled away, grabbing Ward’s gun, until she was next to Kate Keller slumbering blank-faced in her rig, tied to her ventilator and her pacemaker and the machines that controlled her mind. Before she knew it, Natalie had her bloody fingers wrapped around the cords and wires of the ventilator, feeling them thrumming somewhere beyond like a heart, like life, like Vaisong. She pointed the gun at their connection to the computer.

  I’m sorry, Kate, she thought.

  “Stay away. Or I’ll fire,” she said, her voice gone gravel-soft with effort, with lungs too damaged to save. My lungs, she reminded herself, the dead broken things rotting in my chest, every savage thing I am yet proud to be. Mine.

  Ascanio pulled herself up from the ground with the help of the others, brushing the blood from her face. She pursed her lips and surveyed the scene, just like Solano had done earlier. It was the creepiest thing she’d ever seen. “Come now, Ms. Chan. A tantrum every time I leave the room.”

  “Fuck off, Joseph,” Natalie spat.

  Ascanio smiled. “If you wanted to stop this, you needed to start last year. As it is, Aurora builds—”

  “—to win,” she finished. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  She tried to fight, to raise the gun toward the approaching guards—but even she couldn’t handle seven on one, not in this heat, not with her scarred lungs, not with her beaten body, not even with the willing, whining gun. Not when she noticed each of them was in lockstep with Ascanio, all dancing to the same twisted music, all of them uploaded to Ingest, guiltless of their crime. There was no way Natalie could pull the trigger. No.

  The zombies took her gun away, hauled her up, and dangled her by the armpits, moving toward the door.

  I can help you fight,

  the master node said.

  Like before. I can help—

  But he couldn’t, she thought.

  Nobody could.

  26

  Outside the computer core, alarms howled. Natalie’s escorts joined “Ascanio” in heading straight for the ship’s spine, dragging her along like a recalcitrant sack of trash. She saw the blank bodies marching in tandem—and now it wasn’t just something strange she’d half noticed while doing something else. No. The indentures in the hallway pulled themselves out of the way even before Natalie and her lockstep guards turned the corner.

  Compared to this, Sharma’s vision of a bodiless paradise had been positively utopian.

  To be honest, turning humans into nodes made a sick sort of sense to Natalie, who’d watched wartime decisions be made not from tactical necessity but profit/loss margins. A node would be efficiency embodied, the closest to a perfect profit-bearing system the corporate model could provide. Nodes would support a company running at full throttle, able to produce faster, fight faster, close logistical holes—everything that made the human experiment messy and independent and beautiful excised and thrown aside. Orders could be accepted almost before they were given. Margins could be guaranteed. It was the final iteration of an ancient system that had spun into being long before the companies left Earth.

  She examined blank face after blank face as she passed for people possibly running their own minds. Certainly not everyone could function as a secondary or tertiary node; Solano was human still, and not Vai. He was no master node, evolved over millions of years for his specific purpose. He needed people for their skills or their knowledge, people like Ascanio and Ward. People like Natalie.

  People who weren’t here in the corridor.

  Every so often, Natalie would catch a sidelong smirk, or some shoulders held at a certain cant, like the black optikals in the ceiling weren’t enough of a reminder that he was watching, that he was master, that he was a god with his many black eyes.

  And she would have despaired had it not been for the master node walking alongside, reaching for her hand.

  Goddamn it. You’re still here, she whispered.

  I could “fuck off,” as you like to say.

  But then we’d both be alone.

  I’ve been alone my entire life.

  Which is why you should not be alone now.

  He smiled, lines creasing the corners of his eyes.

  You think there is power in loneliness.

  And perhaps t
here is.

  I have learned this from you.

  But there is far more power in—

  If you say love I’m throwing up.

  You’ll throw up anyway.

  He laughed.

  She stumbled forward, grief tugging her down, the guards catching her with quick, forceful hands. And she laughed, too, a wave of it, angry and bitter—

  Stop trying to make me feel better. Love. Whatever it is you think you mean when you say it. I left it behind, I let the skyscrapers infect me, I let them tell me what mattered, and I gave it all up. Everything that Ash and Kate died to protect. I just tossed it. Sold it. Like a good citizen.

  And then he was there, holding her hand.

  Finally.

  Truth enough for together.

  Willowy, thin-mouthed Cora Aulander met them at the door to Vancouver’s central spine, dressed in a dark blue suit cut thick around her shoulders and silver heels strapped to her feet. She looked sour, like she’d just realized that it wasn’t going to be a fun time having her boss literally everywhere she went.

  Aulander touched Ascanio—Solano—on the wrist, keeping her voice low. “We don’t have to do this. You have control over the next body right now,” the board member said. “Emerson Ward has been infected for six months—”

  Solano’s borrowed eyes flickered over toward Natalie. “Ward doesn’t have enough juice, and he just shot himself. Besides, I need him to run the direct jack to the bridge.”

  “You can’t trust her, sir.”

  “We can’t wait for another one of the infected to get strong enough to handle it. We need her now. We have leverage enough to keep her in line until I can enact upload protocol. And besides: are you going to do it?”

  Aulander’s mouth turned into a polite frown. Solano’s words were acid-edged, poison covered in sweetness, and Aulander’s shoulders slammed forward, her body language going on the defensive. “Of course, sir,” she said, hitting the lift button with more force than necessary.