Living

Scott R Jones

 

 

The room is warm enough, but there is a severity to the sparse furnishings, and the migraine whiteness of the storm outside that lights the space is not comforting. Five men sit before the glass and rest tired, unfocused eyes on the featureless weather. They rub their necks, fiddle with their cuffs. Throats are cleared. Drinks are brought in, ice is offered.

“Christ, no. Neat,” says the one in the middle, and the others to his left and right follow suit.

“Forty-two below and she wants to know if I’d like ice. Goddamn security protocols are going to be the death of me, boys.”

The glass flickers, fogs, becomes a viewscreen displaying a logo. Eidolon. A voice slides into the room, startling no one.

“Gentlemen. Mr. Tusk. Good afternoon. Welcome to Melville Station.”

There are murmurs in reply.

“Get on with it.”

“Of course, Mr. Tusk.”

The logo fades and an image fills the screen. A young woman with close-cropped dark hair sits on a metal chair in an empty, grey room. Her arms hang by her sides, her feet are planted squarely in front of her, her mouth hangs slightly open and ajar, caught in mid-sentence.

“You’ll recall the asset that went missing four months ago.”

The man to Tusk’s left leans in. “Aldo. This about that clusterfuck in Prague?” Tusk waves him away, irritated.

“We were able to track it for a time and sent two recovery teams in. Once in Reims, and again in Liverpool. Both teams lost. After Liverpool, the asset somehow managed to destroy our ability to track it via its implants and went to ground. And, for the obvious reasons, it’s impossible to pick up heat from it. So, we were left with video and internet surveillance and eyes on the ground.”

“Wait, what reasons?” says the man to Tusk’s left. “No heat signature?”

“Christ, Griffin! This was all in the briefing on the loop up here,” growls the man on the far right. “It’s not alive, technically. A weapon. It’s got no rights, no humanit—… Look, why are we here? Can you at least tell us that?”

“An Eidolon facility in Toronto was hacked early this morning,” the voice continues. “A professional job, by all accounts, untraceable, but done in such a way as to be instantly flagged. Which caused some concern, as no damage was done.”

“A warning shot.”

“The infosec people certainly thought so. And then the video you’re about to see was found.”

Aldo Tusk nods once, and the woman on the screen comes alive.

 

I’m going to show you some things. Talk about my life a little, such as it is. I’m not sure I’d call it living. I’ve been told that my voice is too monotone, despite the speech therapy, and if you want someone to blame for that, well, blame yourself, Mr. Tusk. Blame Eidolon. I have what your techs call a “denatured personality matrix” and they should know, since they gave it to me. You gave me this emptiness. This emotive lack.

Don’t be fooled, though, if my presentation is a little dry.

Anyway.

 

The first time was in the Kushan Pass. I don’t remember much of it, but what I do is clear and bright. A memory in my flesh, my motley cells.

I remember the bite of dry, chill air in my lungs. Red dust clouds lazy in the rearview below a pallid Afghan sky. Tart chemical taste of a Starburst in my mouth. Pleasant, familiar reek of sweat and soured adrenaline and boredom and gun oil. Dull glint of sallow winter sun off the hood of the APC as we rolled through like we’d rolled through fifty times, a hundred times before.

The IED did what IEDs do. Any other day, we would have picked it up on the scanners from three clicks away, but the NACT fighters in the area had just been gifted with crunchy new cognitive scramblers from their friends in China. Our machines worked fine; it was our own frontal lobes that misinterpreted the data, as angels on high or birdsong or anything but the warning ping. I learned all this later from a stone-faced Eidolon suit, in the moments before he told me what they’d done.

I don’t remember the actual moment of that first time. I’m not sure anyone does, monster or not. The true remembering came later. But the first time? The details I’ve got, sure, the sensations leading up to that moment. The sun rose from the earth below us, a ball of force and fire that eradicated all sound and feeling, all thought and sight. In light. The taste of that Starburst still in my mouth. In light and fury, I died. I don’t remember the dying, though.

Not the first time.

 

I was O’Halloran and Kaminsky and Patel, and the driver of the APC, whose name was Gorman. The suit told me it was only her second tour since onboarding with Eidolon’s Risk Management branch. Risks. They’re what you take when you join the Circuit, but you know that going in, and the crazy money helps.

I’m mostly O’Halloran and Patel, now. The somatic functions, anyway. Hindbrain response. Instinct and reflexes. The suits and techs say that’s the important stuff. The mission-critical aspects of what I am. The rest of me is whatever was left of Gorman. Probably some vat-grown replacement organs in there, too. And your famous nanomesh, Tusk. The miracle that knits it all together, boosts my speed, intelligence, senses. I think with my whole self now. A tech once tried to tell me I had “more processing power in my left pinkie than…” but he trailed off, mumbling, unable to complete the sentence, or unwilling. It’s possible he was trying to be funny. I have trouble picking up on things like that.

Did you know O’Halloran was funny? I’ve read up on all of them, every file. Patel took too many chances. Kaminsky was a brute, Gorman a poet. An actual poet, “warrior-poet” the reviews said, published and everything; you should read her, she’s good. So why do I get her skills and none of O’Halloran’s humor? The pinkie-tech didn’t know either.

Anyway. The mesh. It’s always there, but when Eidolon sent me to the desert, or the jungle, anywhere hot, that’s when I could really feel the stuff, like a deep ocean current flowing just below the skin, chill scaffolding biting through into my borrowed bones. Fault lines of frozen tissue where the continents of me meet, pulsing beneath my fingertips as I trace them. Gorman, see? The mesh has to be super-cooled to stay efficient, so I don’t eat anymore. That space was better suited for the cooling plant.

Hunger stayed with me, though.

 

They thought I was a failure, at first. An early experiment, a toe dipped into strange new water. They made me because they could, to see what would happen. Three years and change in an induced coma, with the occasional surfacing into consciousness to run fresh suites of behavioral protocols or flush out the previous hormone therapy. I slept on an Eidolon slab for three years and woke screaming every time they delivered the jolt that meant some new small eternity of torture. I wouldn’t stop. The screaming. They’d gag me, while they worked, but it would still come, from below, from outside myself, a sound from the other side of where I was living. I was a conduit for it. I’d scream until they put me back under, into the dark. Back into that place, to wait mindless for the next awakening.

But then they went and got it right. The mix, the codes, the mesh, the flesh. They got it right, and I woke and was silent, mercifully, but my dull eyes signaled failure, my slack lips and hanging jaw spoke to them only of a return to their drawing boards, their amniotic vats and modeling frames. I had no speech, no coordination, the cognitive function of a tapeworm. I was cycled out into rehabilitation, taught to walk and eat again, and watched, always watched, though I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything, not for a long time. And when it became clear that I was improving, getting stronger and smarter, that I was perhaps less a failure than originally thought, that I could know things again, I only knew what they told me.

 

Then, I knew only missions. I knew them like familiar dreams.

I was given weapons and intelligence and operation parameters, and sent places. Walked in to jungles and cities and deserts. Dropped from the sky. Swam seas, tireless and unstoppable. I was sent to learn things and destroy things, which amounted to the same thing, to me. I was sent to bring back people or end people. Also the same thing.

With what they had learned and were still learning from me, the techs and their superiors often didn’t even need a whole person to interrogate, and soon I was bringing back just the bits they needed. The head of a militant NACT cell here, the torso and spinal cord of a Colombian cartel lord there. Only the eyes and genitals of the male members of a fundamentalist militia gone to ground in the hills above Moab, Utah, please. My implacable harvest, carried out in uncomprehending silence. Brutal, efficient, and swift. It got weird and weirder, but I never questioned.

And I never forgot. Anything. The nanomesh would hum and pulse and drink in all my experience, feed it back to me in an endless cascade of constantly improving algorithms. I’d complete a mission and a copy of the data would fly from me, bounce off vantablack satellites to paste itself in the mainframes of secret rooms and airtight bunkers. If only they’d just cut it from me. They cut everything else out; why not that?

I could live through a mission, and did, many times. Or die completing one, again, many more times. No difference. No break. No dark place to rest in, thoughtless, empty. Each reanimation would clear out the doubts, sure, but I filled up with high-definition fire and fury, and I never, ever, forgot the deaths. Of others. My own. Never. It’s all up here, still. Murder in my left pinkie, suicide in my right.

I stopped dying, eventually. Got so good I couldn’t be killed, but I never forgot, and I never questioned.

And then I did, because that’s the kind of thing that builds up in a living thing, no matter how you try to wipe it clean. I did question, all at once, and completely, every part of me rebelling and quaking with the rejection of what they’d made me. I’m sure you got a memo on that one, Tusk. Blank and slick as ever, unable to express anything of what I felt—that denatured personality matrix doing its flattening work—I nevertheless became very sick, subconsciously rotting myself from the inside out. I was becoming myself, moving beyond their requirements into a more pure torment. I was choosing to die, willing myself to break apart, to split and cease.

I was quick. I’d removed both of my legs, clawed them to unusable pulp and bone splinters by the time they stopped me. The blue-black coils of my cooling plant spilling out onto the tile where the EMP grenade landed.

That did the job, and then they did theirs, in less time than before. The coma lasted only a month and when they woke me I was already on the plane to Prague, en route to the next mission. Prague is where I learned about the wire they’d slipped into my brain, the wire that triggered firestorms of intense sexual pleasure when I killed.

It felt so right. But it wasn’t. How could it be?

I know, I know. Look who I’m talking to. You made me, Tusk, so I think I can speak to your moral sense with some authority. My best guess is your techs thought it would act as a control. That I’d want to do the work, if it meant I would come like that every time. Marry me to Death, deep down in the core of what I am, and let the good times roll with the heads.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. So wrong. I knew I was an abomination from the first time they woke me from my slab, and on some level, I was all right with it, because I was alive, but after that? After the wire. They may as well have tried to build me a lover to sate myself with, for all the control it gave them.

Prague is where I decided to escape. Prague is where I decided to come for you, Tusk.

Let me show you a new trick.

I’ve been working with some clever kids, since I went into hiding. They laugh at proprietary tech and piss all over your firewalls. I found them, here on the darknet, and showed them what I was, what was in me. If the mesh is my flesh, I said, and it is, then give it to me. Help me be all the Death I can be.

Death is like that IED, I’ve learned. It comes from below, from the place you can’t see. But of course, you’d see me coming. So I had the kids strip your tracking tech from me, and, once that was done, they gave me my body back, piece by piece.

Watch.

 

“What is that?” Tusk leans forward in his chair. “What are we looking at here?”

“Sir. Our initial thinking was that the image was manipulated from this point on…”

“Is it?”

“No. This is in real time. Undoctored and raw.”

“So, this is a… thing. This is within her … she can do this now?”

“It can. Yes.”

***

 

I can be anyone.

The clever kids learned how your mesh worked, encouraged it to spread. It doesn’t just knit me together anymore. It lives through me, breathes. Dances across my skin, swims in my sweat. It’s hard, and I’ve yet to perfect it, but a thought and an image is all it takes to give me a new face. Or an older one. Here’s Patel, or something like what Patel was.

Kaminsky.

O’Halloran.

I prefer Gorman. I’m used to her, feel comfortable in her. Here she is again.

But Tusk, know this: I’ll be neither of them when I’m at your throat, finally. In the street. On one of your private islands. An executive washroom in the sky. Where can you hide where you’ll see me coming? I’ve practiced on a few of the techs who worked on me, the ones I decided to find, anyway. The rest think they’re hiding. Like you.

And if you do find the place where you can hide, where you can see me coming, reduce me to meat and sparks from a distance, well then, I welcome that, too.

Because you won’t dare try to bring me back after this.

The kids weren’t able to do anything about the wire. It’s too deep. I’m a little grateful for that, maybe. It’s hard to tell how I feel. So hard to know what feeling is, but I’ll tell you this for free: when I think about you, I get wet. I do, and it’s not condensation from my cooling plant. I check. You’re not even dead yet, but I’m wet all the same.

So, I’ll come for the last time, with my hands around your throat. That’s living, for me. And dying, finally. Same thing.

After that, I won’t remember.

 

The men sit in silence. The screen fades away, the hiss of ice crystals whipping the glass clearly audible. Drinks are emptied quickly. Throats are cleared.

“Jesus. What latitude are we at again?” says Griffin. “75 degrees? Something like that?”

Fingers tented before his eyes, Tusk says nothing, gazes across the open tundra. The storm passes, and there is nothing to see but drifting snow and cold stone to the horizon. Beyond that, he knows, there is the sea ice and then more frozen ground. More waste. He imagines his fingers as cross-hairs, thinks about a figure in the distance, emerging from that howling whiteness, its hands by its sides.

“Aldo. Aldo, Jesus, are we just…”

Tusk raises a hand sharply.

“Yes. Until it’s done.”

The light in the severe room fades as the night descends. The dark is even less comforting.