Empathy

  Part 17

  Bomber sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, alone, his back to the door. Not a single muscle in his body moved when she came in, but she could sense an immediate jump in his alertness, ready to strike in an instant should the opportunity arise. Neither did he acknowledge the fact that anyone else had entered the room. He didn’t even seem to realise it was her until she said hi.

  “Gina,” he breathed and leaped to his feet. He moved as if to throw his arms around her, but checked himself halfway and stepped back. His eyes studied her for several endless seconds, travelling from her face down to her toes and back up again. “Something’s wrong.”

  “You could say that,” she replied. How much of the truth could she tell him? He might not be a telepath, but in his own way he was sharp as a razor.

  “That bad, huh?” He gave a dry chuckle, and she nodded.

  “Gabriel wants you killed,” she explained. “I think I can stop that from happening, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

  His eyes hardened, and his upper lip curled slightly to show teeth. “That’s it? No ‘hello, hi, how are you, I’m fine, he didn’t brainwash me after all’? You’ve been away for hours with that sociopath, and you walk in here tellin’ me I’m just going to have to trust you?”

  “Look, I haven’t got time to explain, I need you to--”

  “So how good a fuck is he?” he interrupted, his tone and thoughts as sharp as knives, flaying the skin off her bones. “Good enough to turn on us, huh? Good enough to make you a lapdog licking at his heels like Jez?” She tore her eyes away and staggered back from the mental violence in him, but he just stepped in closer and ramped it up. Every scornful word slashed into her, tearing through her mind. “Where is our good friend Jez, anyway? Old Gabe snapped his fingers a few hours ago and she came runnin’. Must’ve been fun, did she join in or just watch?”

  Her arm acted on its own, lashed out out of pure self-defence. There was a heart-stopping crack as her open hand connected with his cheek. She knew he could’ve stopped her but had chosen not to. All the possible reasons frightened her. Horrified at everything and halfway to panic, she started to turn for the door, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back around. A rough kiss forced past her lips, black stubble scratching against her skin.

  “What are you doing, Gina?” he asked softly as he let go of her. “Did any of it mean anything at all?”

  She hesitated, heart pounding in her throat. Then, “Maybe you’re asking the wrong person.”

  A long silence fell. Bomber looked down, and somehow he seemed smaller, deflated. It was as if one of the things that combined to make him Bomber -- a hundred facets assembled into a once-unbreakable whole -- had just abandoned him. Without looking up he said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just sleep. We’ll do the rest.” She reached out uncertainly, stroked her fingers through his hair. She heaved a dry sob. “God, I wish there were some other way...”

  “I’m sure you did what you could,” he said. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Gina swallowed hard, nodded, reached into her pocket. “They gave me a syringe. It’s okay, I checked it, it’ll only knock you out.”

  Bomber sat down and offered his arm without further comment. Gina went down on her knees next to him and pushed the needle into his elbow. The knockout effect took only seconds; he looked into her eyes one last time, and then lay down to sleep. He never saw the tears rolling down her face.

  The next thing she felt was Gabriel’s hand falling on her shoulder, a comforting presence in her mind, his voice in her head, “It’s time.”

  Gina slowly rose to her feet. Her mind was made up, and she’d see it through.

  Entering the dreamworld felt too much like falling through the floor, leaving everything solid and reliable behind. She held on tight to Gabriel. He was her only anchor in this world, her guide and protector, sensing her worries and calming them. It chafed at her to be so reliant on him, but for the moment she had no choice.

  They landed on a flat stretch of valley sandwiched between two hills, one thickly forested, the other almost clear. A thin stretch of paved road snaked through the valley alongside a fast bubbling creek, both leading towards an old timber house built on the riverside. Everywhere the smells of grass and flowers and fresh water greeted them. As they watched, the front door of the house swung open and out walked Bomber wearing a crisp Army dress uniform, kitbag over his shoulder.

  “This is the house where I grew up,” he said. He pointed to the water.

  “I used to swim in that creek, and some days my dad and I would go pick blueberries in the forest.”

  Then he looked down at himself, at his uniform, and frowned. “This must be the day I left to join the Army.”

  As if on cue a black town car pulled up by the front door in a cloud of dust. Two uniformed officers, one in blue and one in green, got out and saluted Bomber. “Private Jacob Dusther?” one of them asked.

  “No,” he replied. “That’s not me.”

  The army man furrowed his brow. “Then who are you?”

  “I...” Bomber swallowed, fear and confusion choking him, and suddenly he dropped the kitbag and drew his pistol. He fired before the men could reach their weapons. Both fell dead on the ground, then vanished into smoke along with their car. In moments there was nothing to suggest they’d ever been there. Then he turned the pistol on Gabriel.

  “This is some kind of trick,” Bomber spat. “You’re just after my real name. You’re not having it!”

  “It looks like he’s brought us in too early,” Gabriel said to Gina, unworried. “Strong memories are annoying like that, they tend to work like magnets. Let’s skip forward.”

  With a wave of Gabriel’s hand, the gun disappeared, and the world vanished into a fog as thick as bricks. At first Gina couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. Then, slowly, new environments started to take shape around them, colour bleeding into the white. Gina had a vague sense of half-remembered years passing by her in both directions, caught a fleeting impression of the car with the two army men arriving at the house a second time, now taking Bomber away with them. But then, before the world could fully resolve, everything distorted and tumbled into chaos.

  Random shapes and colours flashed across Gina’s vision. Noise bashed into her ears like an old optical disc grinding to pieces in its player. Even the smell of the place was wrong; she caught a whiff of sea smell without any water in sight, then a hint of freshly cut grass, then a powerful reek of formaldehyde. Waves of crippling nausea overpowered her, and she doubled over retching, gagging up imaginary vomit.

  “What’s happening?!” she wailed in between coughs.

  “You didn’t tell me he had a memory block!” rasped Gabriel. She could barely make out his voice through the cacophony of sensory input. A single sound rose slowly over the din, however, and she soon recognised it. It was Bomber’s voice, screaming.

  “It’s killing him!” Gabriel told her, pulling her up to her feet. “Quickly, focus on me, everything you’ve got!”

  She nodded and started to concentrate on him, pouring her will into him like she’d done before, but this time he was a channel for her power rather than the target.

  His teeth were set and straining. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and she wondered how he could contain this much mental violence. Instinctively she knew he was holding together Bomber’s mind by sheer force of will, and she could feel him start to shake from the effort. Blinding pain echoed from his mind to hers, turning her vision red, but she held on by her fingernails and kept her focus, knowing what was at stake. Faint strains of music played in her ears, the distorted images flashed faster and faster, the chaos around her reached a fever pitch.

  “Now,” said Gabriel, and the world exploded.

  Brightness. Gina tumbled half-alive in the mental shockwave, farther and farther until she couldn’t sense Gabriel or Bomber anymore, couldn’t feel anything anymore. All
she could see was endless white with no edges or corners. Her senses returned enough to start calling for help, screaming at the top of her lungs, but nobody answered. She floated adrift in the fog.

  It seemed like hours passed while she was lost in the white nothingness. No matter where Gina flew, no matter how hard she waved her arms, no matter how loud she shouted, nothing happened and nobody came to her rescue. No Bomber, no Gabriel, no mysterious stranger. Just Gina, herself and her screaming panic.

  It wasn’t until she calmed down that she started to sense things. Fragments of thought flashing by her. Half-heard phrases, stray images on the wind. She seized onto them searching for anything familiar, but wherever she was, she couldn’t feel a single landmark or clear direction. Trying to reach out and touch the people proved equally useless. No one could hear her.

  She let out a long, tired sigh. “You sure know how to find trouble, girl.” Then she took another look at the white between-place, muttering, “And apparently you’re now one with the fucking cosmos or something. I’d like to get off this train now.”

  “So why don’t you put on the brakes and take control?” asked a familiar voice, and Gina stopped dead in her tracks as a tall, slender Chinese woman in white robes walked out of the mist. Every part of her seemed to glow with light except the eyes, which were shaped like almonds, brown as coffee, and pierced Gina like a pair of needles.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered. Then she took a hold of herself and added, “If you’re dead, Onu, why do I keep seeing you?”

  The vision of Onounu snorted at that, tried to hold in her amusement, and failed completely. Instead she held a graceful hand in front of her mouth as she burst into a long, rich laugh. When she finally finished, she smiled and answered, “You tell me.”

  “Are you real?” asked Gina. “Is this, like... the afterlife?”

  Onounu snorted at the ridiculousness of the question. “Of course I’m not real, Gina. I’m dead. What you see is just the personification of your memories of Onounu, constructed by your mind into a form that you can talk to.”

  Gina stared at the face of her late friend, utterly perplexed. “Huh,” she said. “I can do that?”

  “Oh yeah.” Onu smiled. “Your brain can be smarter than you are sometimes. It’s decided you need a friend to hold your hand and kick your ass, so here I am.”

  “Man, I wish all my hallucinations were this lucid.” Gina ran a hand through her dishevelled hair and rubbed the wildness out of her eyes. When she finished, she felt a little bit less like a frightened animal lost in the woods and a little more like a civilised human being. “So,” she continued, “what am I supposed to talk to you about?”

  “That’s up to you. I’m just a part of you, Gina, I don’t know anything you don’t.”

  “That ain’t entirely helpful, you know,” said Gina.

  Onu clucked with disapproval. “Since when do we use the word ‘ain’t’?”

  “Bite me,” said Gina, and she turned her back. It was easier to speak to this thing when she couldn’t see the face of her dead friend. “Look, the thing is, I’m lost. I want to get back to familiar territory, but I can’t find any.”

  Humming, Onu assumed a thinking pose, tapping two fingertips against her cheek. “Maybe you shouldn’t be looking for familiar ground, but familiar people.”

  “I did! It didn’t work!”

  “Then maybe you haven’t been trying hard enough,” Onu said reproachfully.

  “Seriously, bite me. I don’t have time to be abused by figments of my own imagination.”

  Onu took a few steps towards Gina, walking on thin air, until they were standing face to face. Then Onu slapped her right across the cheek. Gina shrank away, hiding her stinging face, and looked at her friend in complete horror. “You!” she gasped. “You!”

  “Grow up and get your head on straight, girl,” Onu snapped. “This self-pity bullshit is what got you here in the first place. I’m not sure what the hell you’re playing at out there, but it doesn’t make sense half the time and it’s fucking scary the other half.”

  Gina’s head was still spinning. The real Onounu would never have spoken to her like that. She was gentle, she was kind. “You mean Gabriel...?” she blurted.

  “What the fuck did you think I meant?! Yes, I mean Gabriel!”

  Gina bristled and countered, “I don’t care what you think! He’s nice to me--” She saw the slap coming this time, ducked under it and moved with anger-fuelled quickness. She pushed Onu backwards to land on her rump and stood over her, looking down. Before the phantom could say anything, Gina spoke with ice in her voice. “Whatever the fuck you are, part of me or not, I make my own choices and my own decisions. I don’t need any lectures and I sure as hell don’t need you.”

  She spun on her heel and started to walk away. There was no response. When she looked back the phantom was gone, and where it had been she could now make out a patch of grey on the horizon, the only thing out of the ordinary she’d seen so far.

  At first there seemed to be nothing there. Then faint voices came to her, a man and a woman, raised in argument. She moved in closer and swam into reality.

  A dark room rushed out at her, lit only by a few dimmed lights. Glancing outside, she could tell it was near the top of a truly impressive skyscraper, high above the yellow streetlights outside. Covered walkways linked the individual buildings with each other as well as with massive permanent airships or semi-permanent mooring stations for private ships. A hundred colourful holograms played through the sky, but only one caught her attention -- it flashed the letters, ‘Welcome to Laputa.’

  “Just shut up and find them!” Rat shouted at the man suspended in an impressive VR rig. Jock. Gina squealed and moved closer, trying to get their attention, but they didn’t seem to hear her.

  Jock growled, “For the last time, I’ve been trying for the last forty hours, and there’s no sign of them. Not a blip. It’s like they just dropped off the fucking planet.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be a fuckin’ cowboy. Maybe you’re getting old, is that it? You’re, what, thirty? Forty?”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” spat Jock.

  “Sounds over the hill to me.” Rat crossed her arms and sat down to glower at him.

  “If you think you could do a better job then you’re welcome up here.” Jock swivelled around in his rig to face her. “You want to be a cowboy so bad, you come strap in and prove you got what it takes, or sit down and shut the fuck up.” He didn’t get a response; Rat only glared at him some more. He turned back to his original facing and muttered, “Why in hell would you want to be a cowboy, anyway?”

  Rat snorted. “What are you on, man? You got it all. People fall over themselves just to give you stuff. You got power, you just jack in and you can do anything.”

  A bitter laugh escaped Jock’s lips, and he blurted, “Tell me that’s not what you really think.”

  “Hey, I know it’s tough gettin’ up the rankings, but once you--”

  “Once you get some points you’re just as much of a tool as you ever were,” Jock said, his tone deadly serious. “You just don’t get it, do you? You have no clue what it’s all about.” Rat emitted a questioning grunt, and he sighed. “How do you get on the ranking, Alex? You do it by pulling a job. Most wannabes don’t even get that far, they’re caught on their first ride, but it’s the same if you’ve pulled one job or a hundred. You’re still looking to do other people’s dirty work.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” argued Rat.

  Jock suddenly exploded. “Fuck me! Are you fucking retarded?! Do you really have that much pig shit over your eyes that you can’t see what’s right in front of you?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I keep trying to explain this to you. Hackers don’t have power, Alex. We don’t become kings, or creators, or legends. We just follow orders. That’s all hackers ever do, they serve others.”

  “That’s not true! The Hacker Nations are owned by hackers, they got presidents and ever
ything. Or I could make it own my own. You used to be a freelancer.”

  “That was years ago, Alex. It can’t be done anymore, you can’t get a job now without signing up to the Nations. The net’s tame, there’s Feds and Nations watchdogs everywhere, no places left to hide. Why do you think I signed up with the Emperor in the first place?” He paused to think about how to go on. “And what do the Nations do, boy? They take contracts from countries to crack other countries. And what do they do when one of us leaves too much evidence on a job? They catch him, they disavow him, and they extradite him. Doesn’t matter how high up you are. If you get indiscrete, you’re gone, no questions asked. Because there’s always another talented young idiot to step into the vacancy. If your victims can’t collect enough evidence on you, then someone below you in the rankings will be happy to lend them a hand!”

  Jock was panting now, almost leaning out of the rig, but then all the air suddenly went out of him and he sank back. His voice continued, but smaller, subdued. “That stupid fucking hierarchy is all we’ve got. The feigned respect, the phoney glamour. Free stuff and all the girls you can cope with until you get caught.”

  Rat studied the floor with hooded eyes. “It’s what I want.”

  “It’s not enough. It’s never enough,” Jock said softly, looking away.

  She crossed over to where he hung strapped into the rig. Olive-coloured fingers turned his face up and pink lips planted themselves on his. He was too shocked to resist, spluttering only when Rat let him go.

  “You--” he stammered, “I’m not--” He stopped short when she pulled her shirt off and lifted the VR crown from his head. He stared at her body with eyes wide as dinner plates and mouthed, “Oh.”

  Gina turned away to give them some privacy. Who’d have thought, those two together... But if she couldn’t communicate with them then she didn’t need to be here, especially as a peeping tom.

  She slipped back into the white.

  “Okay,” Gina told herself as she searched the blank place for other doorways. “If there’s one, there’s got to be others. One of ‘em must lead somewhere. Just get a hold of yourself. Think.”

  However, her thoughts always turned to the scene she’d just witnessed, and the more she thought about it the more it disturbed her. Not so much the idea of Rat hooking up with Jock -- although that was creepy enough -- but the facts were obvious. Rat and Jock were a zillion miles away. She couldn’t possibly have seen them just now, but it was undeniably more than an illusion. She’d done something or tapped into some power that had opened a window to the other side of the world.

  Nor could she ignore what the phantom had told her earlier. Put on the brakes and take control. Did it really imply that she could control this place if she wanted it badly enough, or at least control her place in it?

  “You were thinking of familiar people,” she said. “Maybe that’s it. If you just think hard enough...”

  She carefully selected a point a few feet in front of her. Then she closed her eyes and imagined a passage at that spot, leading to someplace dark but familiar, with her mental image of Bomber superimposed over everything. Wherever the passage went, it had to lead to him. Once she had a clear picture of what she wanted, she stepped forward without opening her eyes, and was assaulted by a blast of freezing cold.

  Shivering, she opened her eyes and looked around, but still couldn’t see anything. It was as cold as death. She drew her shirt tight about her and rubbed her arms to stave off the frost, but stopped when she heard footsteps echoing loud and close. Her teeth started to chatter as she listened.

  “Who’s this guy?” asked a voice, echoing strangely, as if it came from the bottom of a deep well. Gina felt his presence in the dark, a warm body in the cold, breath steaming in the air.

  “Nobody,” snorted another, deep and male. That answer didn’t seem to satisfy the first voice, and the second sighed. “Another one of those speed jockeys from R&D. They broke him, so we got to fix him.”

  The first voice sounded shocked. “Jesus Christ, he’s going back to combat after this?”

  “Don’t know. Last one got ‘transferred’ out in the dead of night, locked in some big fuckin’ cage screaming and tearing at the bars. She was mental. Clawed the eyes out of two lab techs before they put her down.” The man shrugged. “Who cares? Not our job.”

  “Fuckin’ creepy, man. Do you think he’s listening?”

  “Listening? Marlow, he’s dead. I know you’re new, but we don’t use this cryo shit for nothing. Put your hand on the glass and you’ll freeze your skin off.”

  “So when do we decant him?”

  “Couple hours and he’ll be ready for reanimation. Better let the whitecoats know. C’mon, this place makes me hungry, I need a burger.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” There was a loud mechanical thunk as if a set of lights had been switched off. It slowly started to get less cold, and when she heard a dull booming thump, she instantly knew it for what it was. A single heartbeat. Then, an eternity later, another. And another. It was happening every twenty minutes and speeding up.

  The next thing she knew, the world around her was tumbling, and she felt the impact as her body hit some kind of hard metal slab. Icy water splashed all around her, but the slab was hot, almost hot enough to burn skin, and big clouds of steam rose up around her. Hurried hands wrapped her naked body in a toasty electric blanket. The heat soothed her convulsing muscles. It slowly seeped into her bones until she was warm, and she could make out people talking.

  “Jacob,” said a male voice, and the face attached to it swam into view. Gina gasped when she recognised it as colonel Obrin. “Jacob? Sergeant Dusther? Can you hear me?” Her mouth moved in response, but no sounds came out. Obrin’s hand squeezed her shoulder. “It’s okay, soldier, just relax. It’s over.”

  When she finally got her voice back, she automatically husked, “SitRep, Sir?”

  “You’re back at the base. We recovered your body from the field after your mission, it’s a little beat up, but you’ll be fine. Lie back, we need to check your regen implant.” The hand on her shoulder held her down gently while strange white devices of every description were passed over her and pressed against her skin. A man in a white coat gave the colonel a thumbs-down. Obrin nodded at him and turned back to Gina. He sighed, “Listen, Sergeant. I’ve got some bad news. There was a reporter at the scene, she caught some pretty bad footage of your mission, and has subsequently uncovered more about the project than we’d like anyone to know. SOCOM’s ordered us to shut it down as part of the hush job.”

  “Don’t understand,” Gina replied.

  “It’s alright, son,” said the colonel. “It’s gonna be alright. The... the doctors are gonna be operatin’ on you soon, you just do whatever they say. We’ll... We’ll meet up again someday.”

  “You goin’ somewhere?” Gina stared dumbly at the syringe piercing her arm, and her vision quickly narrowed into dark tunnels. Everything seemed to grow farther and farther away.

  Obrin smiled under his terrific moustache. “No, Jacob. You are.”

  Blackness overwhelmed her.

  Gina took off her flight helmet, climbed out of the simulator, and saluted the instructor. The instructor -- a middle-aged woman with the gold oak leaf of an Air Force major on her sleeve -- didn’t look up from her notepad, busy marking tick boxes on her grading sheet.

  “You came in too hard on the landing,” she muttered almost absently, but the depth of scorn in her voice was withering. “During the computer-unassisted trials, you failed to properly compensate for wind drift and coriolis force twice, causing you to miss the cradle entirely. On the third go you cut power to the rotors too early and hit it like a brick. If that were a real cradle and you were just an inch off, you could very well have smashed the cradle and your copter with it.”

  “I didn’t, though,” said Gina. No protest, no recrimination, just a simple statement of fact. The instructor looked up at her over the rims of her glasses.

&
nbsp; “And that’s the only reason why I’m passing you, pilot,” she growled and put the pen away in her breast pocket. “You will have your full flight certificate by the end of next week.” She threw Gina a dirty look before Gina could start to smile. “Don’t think you have anything to be proud of yet. Now get back in that cockpit and practice without the computer until you get it right every damn time.”

  Gina grinned. She put her helmet back on with a heartfelt, “Yes, Ma’am!”

  The instructor, unamused, gathered her paperwork and left the simulator bay, slamming the door behind her. Gina saluted her after she’d gone and tried in vain to wipe the smile off her face. It was hopeless. The culmination of all that training built into a huge sense of elation, and Gina’s feet floated on clouds as she put them on the rungs back up to the simulator cockpit. Then, suddenly, a pair of hands clapped in the darkness, and Gina jumped with such surprise that she landed right back on the ground looking for the source of the noise.

  “Not too bad, rookie,” a woman’s voice called from across the hall, echoing through the empty space. The owner appeared from behind one of the other cockpits and approached Gina, walking with a cocksure confidence that immediately set Gina’s libido to raging. A mass of thick auburn hair danced around the shoulders of her uniform, an Army captain’s bars gleaming on the epaulettes, and Gina didn’t fail to notice how the fabric clung to her well-muscled body in all the wrong places.

  “Who’re you?” Gina asked. “Ma’am, I mean.”

  “Captain Sarah Caine, F Squadron, second in command,” she replied with a smile. “Just here to check out the fresh meat they’re putting on my team.”

  “Lieutenant Jacob Dusther,” said Gina. “They didn’t tell me I was bein’ added to a squadron yet. Hell, I just got my wings!”

  She chuckled to herself and shook her head. “We’ve been watching your progress since you get here, Jacob. This unit doesn’t usually get trainees, but we were told you’re a natural.” She looked up at the simulator and ran her fingers along its smooth metal nose. “From what I can see, they weren’t wrong.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am, but if you’ve been watching me for that long, why introduce yourself now? Why the theatrics?”

  “‘Cause we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of each other in the near future,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I want you to know exactly who’s in charge here, and that would be me. The Major doesn’t like to deal with rookie screwups, he trusts me to make sure they don’t happen.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Gina. “You’re the boss.”

  “Good. Now that we have an understanding, you can come with me. I’ll show you to your bunk in the morning.”

  Blinking at that comment, Gina blurted, “Ma’am?”

  The captain just grabbed Gina’s collar and pulled her along to a small private trailer in the officers’ camp, only a short walk from the simulator, and shut the door behind them. The next thing Gina knew she was on the bed with most of her uniform missing.

  They awoke when the sun started to peek in through the slits in the windowblinds. The captain rolled onto her side to look at Gina and said, “Just so you know, this isn’t a relationship. As far as I’m concerned we’re just using each other for sex. Right?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Gina. “You’re the boss.”

  “And before you ask, no, I don’t do this with all the rookies. Just the ones I like.”

  “Good to know.” Gina grinned up at the ceiling and thought, This’ll be interesting. She was about to reach for the captain again when something pulled at her, like a cord attached to the base of her spine, and the isolated little world of the military base fell away from her at a million miles per second.