But he doesn’t run. He calls in every man on the chessboard, bishops and castles and Saffron and Hazel, he calls out along all the empty hissing wavelengths at his command. He calls on everyone right up to the sacred whoremother of God’s bastard Son but at the end of it all, the only one to answer that call is me: Alcatraz the Invincible, climbing the stairs to this sad and lonely little command center under a downpour of rain and ordnance and lightning bolts.
Behold, motherfucker. I stand at the door and knock.
The door blows off its hinges.
Lockhart blows back, Gauss gun cradled against his gut: “Come on. Come on! Show me the color of your guts, boy!”
The joke’s on him, of course. My insides and outsides are all the same color by now, all honeycombed and striated and gunmetal gray, and they barely feel the impact of Lockhart’s sabots.
“Fuck you, Tin Man.”
I don’t even bring up a weapon. I grab him by the throat and raise him high and I squeeze. At first I think he’s making those sounds, those hacking choking coughs, but no: It’s Hargreave, invisible and omnipresent as always. Hargreave, laughing.
I throw Lockhart through the window. He arcs down past two stories, clears the razor wire, hits the gravel road facedown not ten meters from the inner compound.
“Good work, son.” Hargreave’s voice pats me on the head. Down on the road, Dominic Lockhart drags his broken body by inches through the rain.
“Now let’s get you inside.”
There’s a gun in my hands.
“I’m opening the Prism entrance right now. Head on over here, as fast as you can!”
Part of me wants to shoot Lockhart in the back. Part of me wants me to stop. I don’t know which part is which anymore and I don’t give a shit. I don’t stop squeezing the trigger until the hammer clicks on empty.
I throw down the Grendel, pick up the Gauss. I keep it moving on my way across the inner compound but nobody tries to get in my way. Everything leads to this moment: Battery, Prophet, Gould. The Wave. The fucking suit. Ever since I crawled up on shore I’ve been stuck in the bleachers; this is the end zone. A jumbled pile of multistoried cubes looms up through the rain like giant building blocks; Hargreave waits in the tallest. This is the place where the answers lie. The end of the Yellow Brick Road. The man behind the curtain. Victory over the Ceph. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, my own resurrection from the dead. It’s all right in there.
The door is open. The light inside is warm and inviting.
I walk in.
A flash bomb goes off in my head. Electricity sings, right down in my bones. I can’t feel my skin—no, the suit. We can’t feel the suit. We can’t move.
“EMP assault.” I don’t know which one of me is saying that. “Systems shutdown.”
“Ah,” Hargreave says from the other side of the universe. “That’s perfect. Thank you, Ms. Strickland.”
I’m blind. I’m blind. The whole world strobes around me in bright jagged flashes. BUD is nothing but tinsel and static.
“Check his vitals, would you? Then have him moved across to the skinning lab. We need to get him prepped as soon as possible.”
The bright light fades in time to see the floor come up like a kick in the face.
Outside I see nothing. Inside, my head is full of gibberish: FRDAY_WV and FLXBL DPED-CRMC EPDRMS and LMU/894411. GPS scribbles idiot wireframes across my brain: Digital Manhattan swings and twists like a tabletop model under an eight-year-old’s swing set. False Prophet reads out omens of doom, incantations full of critical shutdown modes and limbic integration overrides. Eventually the wireframes go away; something like an EEG takes their place. Falsey’s making a little more sense now: We’re switching to core function mode, apparently. Life support takes priority. Deep-layer protocols are engaging. Some kind of system reroute is under way.
That’s nice. Just reroute everything away from me. That’ll be perfect.
Footstep echoing against the shitty acoustics of raw cinder block. Vague, fuzzy bars of brightness passing by overhead. I can’t squeeze my eyes shut, so I squeeze them into focus: fluorescent lights. The EMP’s worn off but I still can’t move; I’m strapped to some kind of rolling gurney.
I raise my head in time to see it push through a pair of swinging doors into a cavernous gray room with tiled walls. Big blocks of machinery sit humming in all that empty space; the place reminds me of a furnace room or a physical plant, one of those dull grimy places infested with ducts and piping you find in the sub-basements of office towers.
“Just another grunt, I’m afraid.” Hargreave, still hidden behind his curtain, sighs to someone who isn’t me. “Prophet could have told us so much more.”
It’s not a furnace room, though. It’s an operating theater. I can tell by the lackey in the blue surgical scrubs playing on the keyboard up ahead, a CELLulite grinning at his elbow. It’s a machine shop; I can tell by the gleaming enamel spider bolted to the ceiling, each jointed hydraulic arm tipped with a laser or a scalpel or—
I’ve never seen a lug wrench with a built-in spinal needle before.
“At least we have the nanogear intact, that’s all that really matters. The rest I’ll have to improvise once I’m in the suit.”
The spider drops with a soft whir, comes to a stop a meter over my chest. It unfolds its legs, flexes each joint as if warming up for a marathon. Bits and pieces click together like chopsticks.
“Let’s get started.”
The table flexes around me, tightens my restraints. Lights wink at the end of those articulated arms; tiny saws whine into the ultrasonic, dip and weave and plunge. My bones rattle in their cage. Suddenly I’m seeing the world through blood-colored glasses.
Way over at the corner of my eye, the man in scrubs pays very close attention to the monitor on his desk. His eyes are bright and tiny over his surgical mask. They never look at me.
Just following orders.
“Ah, my young friend.”
Hargreave again. Deigning to address me directly. “I had hoped to spare you consciousness at this point, but the nanogear is not proving cooperative. I am truly sorry for this betrayal, but I really have no choice. I need the suit—this particular suit, in fact—if I’m to have any hope at all of stopping the Ceph. A simple soldier will not suffice here.”
My body goes numb. The room still rattles in my eyes, but suddenly I can’t feel the vibration.
“Don’t misunderstand me. You’ve proven far more resilient than I ever would have expected. You are a soldier, and a damn good one, and you would be an asset in repelling any invasion, alien or otherwise. But allow me to fill you in on a little secret.” I can hear the wink in Hargreave’s voice, I can hear him leaning in to share his little confidence. “This isn’t an invasion, son. It never was.”
I wonder if these restraints are even necessary anymore. I bet they’ve cut my spinal cord.
“It’s obvious if you think about it. Why would a race that can terraform worlds, that plans and builds across light-years, across millennia—why would they be interested in anything so vulgar as territory?”
My eyes go out. I’m in a black void: blind to the abattoir, numb to my own vivisection, cut off from everything but Hargreave’s voice, the snap of lasers, the whine of spinning bone saws.
“There was a time, son, when people tried to save the rain forest. Oh, they were an emotional lot, woolly-minded and disorganized, but a few of them knew that they could never get a shortsighted and indifferent public to care about a bunch of trees half a world away. People don’t give a rat’s ass about anything unless you can answer the question, What’s in it for me?”
The saws are gone. The lasers are gone. I’m deaf now, as well as blind and numb and paralyzed. But somehow I can still hear Hargreave here in my head. True to his word he stays at my side, walking with me through the valley of the shadow of death. Jack Hargreave is my universe.
“So the more clever environmentalists came up with an answer: There’s Taxol, t
here are antioxidants and anti-aging drugs, there are cures for every cancer and filters for all the shit we pump into the air. There are a billion compounds and a million cures, the rain forest might make you immortal someday, but we lose it all if we wipe it out without even knowing what’s in there.”
I know what this is: this cable-cutting, this endless monologue, this pointless fireside chat with the senile old uncle you wish would just shut the fuck up. This is deliberate distraction. This is an attempt to take my mind off what’s happening. This is Jack Hargreave being merciful.
I wonder if Prophet ever found out what it means, when a man like Hargreave calls you son.
“It was a good strategy, and it might have even worked, but then some company—actually, I think it may have been one of mine—synthesized Taxol. And then of course we arrived at the dawn of Synthetic Biology, and why leave all those millions of hectares undeveloped on the off-chance of some miracle cure when you can program artificial microbes to shit out whatever you need? The rest was history. As is the rain forest, sadly.”
I think he’s receding. His voice sounds—fainter, somehow. Hard to tell, with nothing to compare it with. Maybe it’s just my imagination.
“But the Ceph are so much smarter than we are. They know we can only see what we look for, we can only make what we can imagine. Nature—four billion years of experimentation, endless mutation and selection, Darwin’s tangled bank in all its glorious diversity—Nature creates what we haven’t imagined, gives us vital gifts we’d never even think to look for.”
No, his voice is definitely fainter.
“The Ceph understand these things: They come upon life-bearing worlds and they set up their monitoring stations to watch nature grind out its wonders and they leave it alone. And every million years or so they drop by to see how their garden grows and let me tell you, my friend, they don’t much like the cancer that’s infested this place since the last time they were here. Here we are, growing out of control, destroying everything around us and too stupid to see that we’re destroying ourselves in the process.”
I have to strain to hear him now. He must be light-years away.
“We are metastasis made flesh, my boy. We are pestilence, we are the weeds in the garden, and we are not facing warriors at all. We’ve never seen their soldiers, and I pray we never do. This is a pruning expedition. We are getting our asses whipped by a bunch of gardeners who are improvising in the face of the unexpected.”
I can barely hear him at all. My whole universe is a whisper.
“And that is the only reason we have a hope in hell of winning.”
Gone.
I wonder how many pieces I’ve been cut into. I wonder how many pieces are thinking this.
(Cellular force overload, someone says at the bottom of a very deep well.)
All things considered, I think I’m thankful to be here. To be nowhere. A far cry from my Happy Place, but at least I can’t feel the drills and the needles anymore. I can’t hear my Creator and my Tormentor. I know I’m being disassembled somewhere, but at least I can’t see it happening. You learn to be thankful for what you get.
(Wake up.)
That’s not Hargreave. That’s—
(Wake up, marine.)
I know that voice. I shouldn’t be hearing it though, not now. Haven’t Hargreave’s lackeys cut it out of my head yet?
“Wake up, marine! This is no time for dying!”
It’s False Prophet. It’s False Prophet, I can see his face hanging there in the void before me. It’s nothing like the original, it’s barely even an imitation. Just pixels and polygons. A constellation, a thousand stars that just happen to look like a human face.
It’s the goddamn suit. The suit is shouting at me.
“Get your ass back in the fight!”
Go away. You’re dead. I saw you die.
“Back at you, soldier. You think that’s an excuse?”
Maybe this is SECOND in denial, just a dumb biochip reliving the good old days in an attempt to rekindle the flame with a partner who dumped it days ago. Or maybe it’s pretending to be Prophet because it accessed a psych database somewhere and decided I’d react better to something that sounded like it had a life. Shit, maybe it is Prophet—some warped-mirror cartoon of Prophet at least—cobbled together from loose talk and synaptic echoes long after the conscious meat blew itself to kingdom come. Maybe it’s insane, maybe it thinks it’s real.
Or maybe not. This could just be the oxygen-starved brain of Cyborg Asshole Mk2 making stuff up as it goes along, Tin Man’s version of a near-death experience: as meaningless as all those lights and angels the neo-agers go on about during their asphyx parties. Maybe there’s not even any brain left to starve, maybe it’s been dead for hours and all these thoughts are running along a net of carbon nanotubes. Maybe they’ve already cut open my helmet and puked their guts out from the stink of all the dead meat that’s been rotting inside for fuck knows how long …
What are you, in here with me? Are you alive? Are you even real?
“Enough of this shit, marine!” it bellows. “Enough!”
What the fuck are you? What the fuck am I?
I am awake.
Somewhere very close, alarms are singing. Multijointed robot arms quiver spastically overhead. The doctor with the optional Hippocratic Oath is not avoiding my eyes now, no sirree: He’s staring right into them, and he looks about ready to piss himself. Flickers of unfocused light and shadow play across him: reflections of outputs changing far, far faster than they have any right to. And although it should be impossible for anyone to retrodict those vague blobs and blips into anything even approaching the original image that cast them, somehow I find it easy. I can see the good doctor’s monitor reflected in his scrubs, in his mask, in those dark shiny pupils grown so huge you can barely see the irises around them.
I know it before he says it: “Some kind of overload! The suit’s—it’s rejecting the rip somehow …”
“Stop him!” Hargreave’s voice rises an octave. “Kill him if you have to, but don’t damage the hardware!”
What, no sad farewell? No fond final words for your latest son?
Doors slam open up past my head. I hear boots on bricks. “Headshots only!” Hargreave cries to the CELLulite leaning over me.
“Got it.” The CELLulite slides back the bolt on his pistol, lays the muzzle against my forehead. I keep waiting for SECOND to lay on the tacticals—AY69 AUTO, ENEMY COMBATANT, THREAT LEVEL: HIGH—but I guess they shut it down. I’m alone at last.
My executioner’s head explodes.
Then his buddy’s.
Then the man in the scrubs, and some hapless med tech I never noticed before now. Four shots, four kills. I turn my head, almost interested, while Hargreave seethes on the radio: “Tara, no! Tara, listen to m—”
She kills the channel and goes to work at the doctor’s station. Her fingertips come dark and shiny off the keys.
“CIA,” she says. “Special ops. Recruited three years ago now.”
I wonder what her code name was. Probably Deus Ex Machina. Or Belle.
“You’ve got me to thank for this whole shitstorm.” She barely glances up; her eyes, her bloody fingers are all about the controls. “I’m the one who ordered your squad in to extract Prophet and Gould in the first place. Best-laid plans, huh?”
My restraints pop open. Up in the left-hand corner of my eye, uplink icons wink back into existence.
Strickland’s at my side, her hand at my elbow, urging me to sit. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I’m a little bit surprised to see that everything’s still attached. I swing my legs over the edge of the gurney, roll to a sitting position. GPS and MODE SELECT come back online. A panicky amber light on the ceiling spins in its glass bubble, stabbing my eyes five times a second.
Little crosshairs pan across my field of vision and lock down on the heavy assault rifle one of the CELLulites dropped while he was getting his brains blown out. BUD se
rves up a subtitle: HEAVY ASSAULT RIFLE: GRENDEL/HOL. PT.
“Let’s go, man! The Ceph are coming and we’ve got to get Hargreave out.”
And she’s right. Suddenly, I’m there. All that fatalistic indifference I was feeling just a few minutes ago, that candy-ass que sera resignation to my own death? Fuck that. I’m back, baby. I’m strong, I’m stoked, I’m ready to kick ass all the way to the next millennium.
Nice to have you back, SECOND. I missed you.
No, I don’t think he was right at all. He got maybe halfway there, tops. But the fact is, even gardeners would’ve done a better job.
I mean, try and wrap your head around the magnitude of the imbalance here. Maybe you’re imagining us as a bunch of cavemen going up against a Taranis or a T-90 with reactive armor, but that’s not even close. Cavemen are people, too, Roger, they’ve got the same raw brainpower even if their tech is Stone Age. The Ceph are a whole different species. So let’s say Hargreave’s right and we’re not facing soldiers. Do you really think the world’s lemurs, say, would have a better chance against a bunch of gardeners? If a bunch of gardeners wanted to take out an anthill, would they attack the ants with formic acid and titanium mandibles? ’Course not. They’ve got sprays and poisons and traps and guns, things no ant has ever seen, things no ant could possibly defend against.
So why the Ceph gunships, Roger? Why the exoskeletons that walk pretty much like we do, and the guns that fire pretty much like ours, and bloody artillery for chrissake that does pretty much what ours does? Why are Ceph weapons and tactics so much like ours, hmm?
I don’t think they’re gardeners at all. I don’t even think they’re aliens. Not the real aliens, anyway. Not the real gardeners.
I think they’re hedge clippers and weed whackers, left in the shed to rust. I think they’re the dumbest of the garden tools, programmed to bump around the property mowing the lawn while the owners are away because after all, this place is too far out in Hicksville to waste real intelligence on. I think they have basic smarts because where they come from, even the chairs are smart to some degree—but nobody ever read them The Art of War, because they’re goddamn hedge clippers. So they’ve had to learn on the fly. Their tactics and their weaponry look like ours because they’re based on ours, because we were the only game in town when those cheap-ass learning circuits looked around for something to inspire them. And I think a lemur wouldn’t have a hope in hell against a bunch of gardeners, but he just might stand a chance in a war against the Roombas.