“This will never work.”
“Fuck off.”
“We look stupid.”
“Get over yourself, woman.”
In my hand, I held a pair of lucky dice.
Every army in history has had at least one soldier with a pair of lucky dice.1 These days, every soldier carries ’em. Standard dice. Polyhedral dice. Icon dice. Dice within dice. Before every TP, a soldier will throw his or her lucky dice to determine the outcome. Since there is no consensus on how to read the throw of the dice, you can pretty much decide for yourself what the outcome will be. And if you die, or become horribly distorted or mutated, well, you must have had the wrong pair of lucky dice.
Taking the lucky dice off a TP warrior is no easy thing. But we managed it. And now we stood in the Rock’s magnificent Star Chamber, where a visual array of every planet in the humanverse sprawled three-dimensionally around us. It was like floating free in the vast and awe-inspiring void of space, but without experiencing the deadly cold, and with helpful captions on all the stars and planets. I turned my back on the star map, tossing the dice from one hand to another. Fraser watched us, hiding his anxiety and concern beneath layers of dour Scottish melancholy.
“Good luck, lassies,” he said.
Lena snorted at his condescension. Whereas I tried to be more tactful, in recognition of Fraser’s role as my mentor and leader:
“Go fuck yourself you four-eyed Jock bastard,” I said. And I threw the dice over my shoulder.
They flew through the air and went straight through the virtual star array. I turned. Fraser had noted the points of impact, and was analysing the results.
“Die one,” he said, “a black hole in spherical sector D49.”
“Not so good.”
“And die two?” asked Lena.
“You’re not going to believe this,” said Fraser.
“I’ll believe anything,” I said. And it was true. Ever since the nine years, six months and four days, lucky breaks and dumb coincidences have dogged my life. I have come to accept it as normal.
“Just activate the TP,” said Lena. “We’ll take it from there.”
That was just plain stupid!
“Tell me where we’re going—” I began to say.
But then we were there.
Cúchulainn.
I should have guessed.
It had the perfect circularity of all coincidences. I was back where I started from. Journey’s beginning.
This, however, was wrong. I mean terribly, insupportably wrong.
I mean, just think about it! This is my life. It’s not a fucking story. The actual lives that actual people live aren’t like this. They’re – episodic. What you might call picaresque. Things just happen, then other things happen. Whereas stories are—
Sorry, let me tell this the way it happened, okay?
First, me and Lena hit the ground standing and I saw where we were.
And then the shooting started.
But just before the shooting started – yeah, my mind was really racing at this point! – I went on to realise that in fact my life has been a story. It has a shape, and a purpose. In other words, it has an author.
Morgan.
I recognised him at once. Or rather, not quite at once. Not till he spoke my name. But then. I knew him then.
I’m aware that I’ve never mentioned this person before, as someone who appears as a character in my life-story. That’s because I didn’t know who he really was. And I didn’t know, didn’t AT ALL realise, that he would be relevant to this tale.
You see, Morgan was my gaoler, in the villa of Baron Lowman, where I was imprisoned. But I knew him then as Henry, because that’s what Lowman called him.
Fucking Henry! I didn’t even know his (fictitious) surname. He was just a guy, whose name I vaguely knew, who was responsible (on a shift basis, alternating with two other guys) for supervising my internment. And who, from time to time, made me dance. By which I mean, he thought-controlled his remote control and activated my whedon chip, and turned me into a dancing grinning puppet. Just to show me what would happen if I ever dared to fuck around.
Henry wasn’t cruel to me though. He was just doing his job. In fact, he tried to be my friend. He brought me treats – food, chocolate, fine clothes – and made sure I always drank the best wine. And he never took advantage – you know what I’m saying. It would have been easy for him to do it, but he never did.
He even offered to help me escape once. But I saw that for the obvious trap it was. I never trusted him, to be honest. Though in fairness, I didn’t trust anyone by that point.
But within seconds of arriving in Daxox’s bar on Cúchulainn, the moment he spoke in fact, I realised that Henry and Hispaniola Morgan are one and the same person.
“Artemis,” he said. And that’s when I knew.
What a coincidence, huh?
There’s more.
Remember, we hit the ground standing and I saw Morgan and he spoke and I recognised him, and I thought all these thoughts, or rather an abbreviated intuitive version of them. But it all happened very fast and there were of course an awful lot of OTHER extraordinary facts to assimilate.
Firstly, we weren’t just on Cúchulainn, we were in Laguid. And we weren’t just in Laguid, we were in Daxox’s club, the Dahlia, where I had spent so many happy and indeed drunken hours. It was the early morning, the club was empty apart from a group of men playing a dice game at a table. The game was – it doesn’t matter what the game was! It just struck me as yet another eerie coincidence. For I’d thrown the dice at random and it had led to me being teleported here, where a game of dice was—
Spooky, huh? Wait till you get to—
No, let me get through this:
As I’ve explained, the first man I recognised was Morgan, aka Henry. Of course I knew Morgan from his photographs and the film footage of him, but had never made the connection. But when he spoke my name – “Artemis” – in that throaty growl of his, the years came rushing back.
I didn’t have time to reminiscence. I was too busy with my sitrep, identifying threats and planning a course of action. Morgan was an obvious danger, he was my deadly enemy and was sitting in a military warsuit, though with the face mask off. Next to him was—
This is where it gets really strange.
Next to him was Daxox. Old frog-face. My lover and—
“Glad you could make it,” said Baron Lowman, in his usual courtly tones.
Because the fourth man was a tubby guy with an eager look, and when he saw Lena he beamed as if she were his long-lost mother. “Lena!” he trilled, and beside me I could hear Lena gulp, literally gulp.
The fourth man, I kid you not, was Peter Smith, aka The Cheo, aka my brother and Lena’s son.
The fifth man was Flanagan.
“Lena!” I screamed and I threw myself across the room with guns drawn, firing in mid-air with unerring accuracy. While Lena stood like a fucking fool, gawping.
The first bullet fired by Morgan hit her on the chest, jarring her body armour and shocking her into action. When she moved, she moved fast. Meanwhile, I fired thirty rounds while in a crouching position, rolled and dived, and fired again.
Morgan was the first to die. His warsuit was strong enough to withstand a missile burst, but who the hell wants to play cards with a face mask on? So he was bare-faced, and I had a perfect target and I blew out his brains with my first six shots.
Peter Smith was the cautious sort. He was wearing his hardglass mask. I scored six direct hits on his face but all bounced off and by then he had drawn his gun and was shooting back.
Daxox stood no chance. Once she’d got her shit together, Lena engulfed him in plasma fire then fired exploding shells at the fireball. She didn’t shoot at anyone else, just Daxox. He too had a hardglass mask but it didn’t help him. He burned alive, as the bullets cracked his hermetic seal and the plasma licked outside, then burned within.
Flanagan moved like the wind and shot me when I landed. The impact spun me back and I flipped and landed and fired about fifty shells all of which missed him. He was fast and he was graceful, and he really knew how to dodge.
Then Lena popped him with a bullet while he was in mid-sideways-leap, and it threw him off course and he crashed awkwardly to the ground. And she was across the room in four flips and put a limpet-mine on his face mask.
Then she looked at me. I could see her face through the hardglass. It was an expression of sheer horror.
I leaped towards her and caught her and we teleported twelve feet away. When the bomb blew off Flanagan’s head, we were out of range.
“Nice work,” I said. The explosion had tumbled Peter Smith off his feet and dazed him. I moved swiftly across and coup-de-grâced him by severing his head with my dagger.
Then we masked off. Sweat was pouring down our faces. Or was it tears?
“Come and see,” I said, beckoning to Lena.
“No.”
“Come!” I grabbed her by the hand, and dragged her over to Flanagan’s dead body. And I put my gun on laser setting and after sixty seconds, I managed to bore a hole in his armour. Then I carved a line down his torso. His body peeled open like a fruit.
“I can’t bear to, I can’t—” muttered Lena.
“Look,” I said. Inside the body of “Flanagan,” there was no heart, no lungs. No blood gushed out, no intestines spilled their vile load. It was all silver metal in hermetically sealed units.
“You do understand—” I said.
“I understand,” Lena snapped.
“And what this means is—”
“I get all that.”
“And this guy,” I said. I did the same trick on Morgan’s dead body. And his corpse split open to reveal robot organs.
“Cyborg,” said Lena.
“I know him,” I said, pointing at cyborg-Morgan, and sketching in the history briefly.
Lena got it at once. The implications I mean. She knew my life-story you see. Not from me, from Fraser. But she knew all about what Daxox had done to me. And fear was in her eyes.
“My fault,” she said.
“My fault, all my fault,” she said, in tones of utter horror.
And she was right. All the horror of my life. All the terrible things I experienced in the nine years, six months, and four days.
They all happened to me because of Lena. And her relationship with Flanagan.
Back up a bit.
What follows is the story of my life, as it really happened. Not the way I thought it was happening at the time.
Picture this flashback moment: there I was, an eighteen-year-old idiot, serving in a bar in Gullyfoyle and a guy came in. He was a gangster from Cúchulainn. And he told me tales of what it was like in Laguid, the wildest city in the humanverse.
And in return – well, why wouldn’t I? – I told him all about my life on Rebus. And about my dad, Professor McIvor, and my heartless mother who’d abandoned me. And we talked politics too. There was a big galactic war going on round about then. A pirate called Flanagan was hooked up with some relative of the Cheo called Lena Smith. Without FTL or TP, wars were slow protracted things in those days. So we discussed it. Why wouldn’t we?
So when I went on the run from Gullyfoyle, where did I go? Laguid, of course, capital city of Cúchulainn. The place this hood had just been telling me about… Coincidence?
Well, yes. But once I’d made that one random decision, the rest all followed.
Because this gangster now knew my story. And when he got back to Laguid, he told his pals about me. And when I turned up, fencing a hot jewel… you get the picture? The story spread.
And then I met Daxox.
Daxox was the boss of the gangster I met on Gullyfoyle, of course. So he too knew all about me. He also knew about Lena, and her fling with Flanagan, And her affair with McIvor. And the fact that McIvor was my dad, which meant Lena was almost certainly my mother. Because in the days of beaconspace, this stuff is so fucking easy to find out.
And he knew too that I’d stolen the jewel, so he sent his men to kill me knowing that I would kill them. Another test. You remember he had that thing about testing me?
The key fact here is that Daxox – though I didn’t know it then, I only know it now – had an ally, a fellow capobastone, called Hispaniola Morgan. Who, for reasons I hadn’t yet fathomed, was based on Cúchulainn and not on his home world of Morgan’s Planet.2
So Morgan too got to know about me, and my history.
Cause, effect. The ripples just never stop.
Morgan knew Flanagan, as you know. And he hated him with a vengeance, but had no way of getting to him. And then along I come…
And from that moment on, my life was authored.
You know what I’m saying? Morgan pulled the strings. Daxox did all the terrible things he did – because Morgan told him to.
Which means that despite everything, Daxox may actually have loved me. But Morgan was a hard guy to resist. And Morgan wanted to take revenge on Flanagan. Which he did, by punishing me.
Back up a little more. Why did Morgan hate Flanagan so much?
The history books say it was because Flanagan was an idealist, appalled at Morgan’s massacres. But that’s all shit. I knew Flanagan. He was my friend. But fuck me, he was ruthless. And unscrupulous too.
But in the course of their joint adventuring, Flanagan screwed Morgan’s wife, Medea – I got this from Lena, it’s the truth. Then Morgan found out and killed Medea with his bare hands, in a fit of blind rage. So Flanagan lost his rag and trapped Morgan on a spaceship leaking air. Morgan, somehow, escaped, to the nearby planet of Xavier.
And you know the rest.3
Cut to many years later. Morgan sees a chance to take revenge. A girl arrives in his partner’s club who is the daughter of Flanagan’s latest squeeze. So he arranges for her to become a – and now you’re with me.
Not quite the same as Morgan getting a chance to fuck over Lena, the love of Flanagan’s life. But near enough. Psycho logic, yeah?
And that’s the story of my life, as far as I’ve been able to piece it together. I’m just a pawn in the deadly game between Morgan and Flanagan. Eventually, I’m guessing, my dead body would have been sent to Flanagan, with a note explaining who I was, and where I had spent the last ten years. And that, yeah, that would have stung.
It’s like Hooperman and Saunders all over again except, of course, Saunders escaped. And that story never had an ending.
And the “author” thing? This is how it worked. Morgan wrote my life as a tragedy. Then I turned it into a revenge drama.
Backstory over.
As we were leaving Daxox’s club, we saw two cops arriving, carrying guns.
Both were Morgan.
“It’s a coup. They’ve had a fucking planetary coup,” I said to Lena.
“Why didn’t we know?”
We were out on the street now, making our escape as swiftly yet unobtrusively as we could.
Once we’d got out of the club, Lena had wiped the blood off my face; a smart move because I’d been drenched in it. Then we’d put on our street camouflage clothes and dumped our backpacks and Xenos rifles. But we still had warsuits on beneath our civvies, and our force field generators were strapped to our abdomens. And handguns. We were carrying, between us, an awful lot of handguns.
As we walked, a man bumped into me. It was Peter Smith. Lena stared at him.
“You got a fucking problem?” Smith demanded.
“No problem.”
Smith walked on. Lena continued to stare after him.
Three Flanagans walked up to us, talking animatedly. Lena stared at them. They ignored her. But they gave me a long hard appraising look. Followed by a wolf whistle. I smiled appreciatively and walked on. This was freaking me out.
There were plenty of ordinary citizens on the streets too, of course. Market stall owners. Pedestrians. Flybikers. This was the same old Laguid with polluted skies and busy walkways and too much traffic. But everyone we passed had a haunted look.
A holo image on every street corner said: CURFEW IN FORCE. ANYONE FOUND ON THE STREETS AFTER TEN P.M. WILL BE HUNTED UNTO DEATH. BY AUTHORITY OF HISPANIOLA MORGAN, LORD AND EMPEROR AND POTENTATE OF THIS UNIVERSE.
These old-time villains, they are so baroque.
I saw a Daxox, and approached him.
“Do you know me?” I asked.
“I’d like to,” he leered.
“Daxox,” said Daxox.
“You remember me?”
He thought hard. “I fucked you once?” He leered.
“You were great,” I assured him.
Lena and I walked on.
“They’re not sentient,” I said to her.
“Of course they’re sentient. They’re cyborgs!”
“I mean they’re not – not smart. They’re like apes.”
“Degraded copies?”
“Or older copies. Cyborgs go mad, with time.”
“There are thousands of the bastards.”
“Millions maybe.”
A city full of dead people.
A city full of dead people who Lena and I had once, and intimately, known.
It was screwing with my head.
We walked on. Heavily armed Flanagans and Daxoxes stood at every street corner. Heliplanes hovered above, crewed by Peter Smiths, as well as flybuses in which Smith was both the driver and many of the passengers. And Morgans in the bodies of beautiful women strutted along, attracting admiring glances. Though most often the Morgans were male, and possessed of an eerie aura of authority. And the Baron Lowmans too were to be found in many guises – wearing rich robes, or in smart casual jeans and T-shirts flyboarding on the walkways, or in city suits.
And everywhere we went, electronic mosquitoes flocked, gathering data on all street-level activity.
Then one of the soldiers turned, and I could recognise her easily through her hardglass visor.
It was me.
“Identify yourself,” said Artemis-soldier. And I couldn’t stop myself. I drew my Philos handgun and fired six times at her visor, then grabbed her and threw her and broke her neck.
The cyborg didn’t die, she just lay on the ground waddling her legs.
“Run,” said Lena, and we ran.
I knew this city so well. I knew every alley and hideout. I knew the clubs and their backdoors and the fire escapes, and the hidden entry ways into the fabricator plants.
We ran and heliplanes hovered overhead and called on us to stop and we ignored them and warning bursts were fired at us. We were masked off, in street clothes, trying to blend in. But the fact we were running like fuck through a city under siege was enough to draw attention to us.
We turned a corner and a squad of six soldiers (mostly Flanagans) saw us and opened fire. We leaped and fired in mid-air, aiming our exploding bullets so they ploughed holes in the sidewalk. The soldiers tumbled over each other and into the pit we’d created. And we ran.
Ran down an alley. Ran through a side door that I unlocked via my Rebus link. Ran inside the illegal manual labour workshop. Human workers were handweaving carpets, their faces pale, their fingers torn with cuts. We ran through as a security guard shouted at us to stop. He drew his gun and fired and I took him down with a bullet to the knee. He fell, cursing misogynistically.
And still we ran. Through the double doors, kicking them open and stepping to the side in case of ambush. A guard shot at us and we leaped up high and clung to the wall with our adhesive shoes and ran past him, catching him a good old kick as we passed by. Then through the red door, up one set of stairs. I blew a hole in the wall and we ran into the next building, the Hunter Refinery. And we ran down the stairs there and out the back to safety and—
Withering plasma fire greeted our emergence and with clothes ablaze we ran back in. Lena and I doused ourselves in flame retardants. Our faces were stinging with the heat. And we were red-cheeked and hot with the effort of the ceaseless running. I nodded, and we took another door that I knew would lead us down to the basement. It did. Once there, we broke open a ventilator shaft and crawled through. It was a long slow wriggle. I thanked my lucky stars I did not have a fat arse! Lena however was not so lucky. (Heh!)
I shoved her through the last few feet, then we collapsed in a heap at the other side.
It was a strange surreal moment – lying on the floor enmeshed and entangled in the limbs and lardy backside (hey! I call it as I see it!) of my own mother.
The moment passed. We got back on our feet, and started running again.
The doors ahead of us were locked and hardmetal sealed. So we put a limpet bomb on the floor and blew a hole in it and jumped through. We did the same for another three floors, and that linked us up to the fibre optic subways beneath the city. We crawled through there on our stomachs, still smelling our own charred flesh from the earlier plasma-blasting, until we emerged in the basement of the Abrox fabricator.
There, we took stock.
“How the fuck,” asked Lena, gasping like an old wheezy horse, though I have to admit, she had kept up with me, “do we win this war?”
Good question.
I asked Magog.
There were, I learned six hundred thousand cyborgs on this planet, and fifty thousand or so were me.
Or rather, they were robot bodies built in replica of me. Very funny Cyborg-Daxox. Fuck you.
The Flanagan I’d killed had been a warrior. But his mind wasn’t the real Flanagan-mind. I was sure of that. Or so I told Lena. In fact I wasn’t so sure but—
What the fuck. Let’s work on this provisional hypothesis:
Morgan and Daxox have cyborged themselves. And, as a gag, they have created cyborg bodies that are replicas of their enemies and allies. Peter Smith is not the real Smith; he has none of Smith’s memories or personality, he just looks like him. In the same way, Flanagan is not the real Flanagan. But Daxox and Morgan – they are the real McCoy. Or rather, the replica real McCoys. Or rather—
It gets tricky doesn’t it?
Lena was over her blue funk by now. She too was adamant that we weren’t fighting the real Flanagan; and that was a comfort to her, since we’d so recently killed him.
And as we outlined our war strategy, her eyes sparkled and her mood lifted. This was the old Lena. The legendary Lena. I liked her that way.
Picture the scene. There we were, huddled in the basement of a dimly lit fabricator building. Faces flushed, bodies battered, clothes ripped revealing black warsuit armour beneath. Just the two of us, with no means of calling for help, facing an army of half a million or so armed and dangerous cyborgs.
Just the kind of odds that Lena and I both like.
“It’s not fucking fair! I know so much about you!” I told Lena, angrily.
We’d been in the basement an hour. I was in a reflective mood. And it occurred to me that this would be a good opportunity to bond with my mother.
But instead, I began bitching at her.
“Yeah, you have a problem with that?” she acknowledged, defensively, in response to my accusation.
“It’s so damned annoying,” I protested. “There’s nothing to find out. I’ve read your thought diary, I know every last thing about you. I know about the freckles. I know about the Kingdom of Alchemy.” She rolled her eyes. “I know about all the men. And the drinking. And the drugs. And the game where you stop the heart of the man you’re—”
“Wash your mouth out girl.”
“Hey, it’s in the book!”
“The book should never have been published.”
“Yeah, like, you didn’t accidentally on purpose—”
“I did not ‘accidentally on—’ ”
“You’re just a braggart.”
“I was baring my soul.”
“Euch, please don’t, your soul is vile.”
“I agree.”
“Now you’re being mock-humble.”
“Ah, you know that trick?” Lena said, with a mock-sweet smile. She gave as good as she got, this woman, even with her own daughter.
There was a silence, which lasted a little while.
I was working hard, by the way, all this time, fighting the war with the cyborgs. I’ll explain how in a moment. But I still had enough headspace to chat. And to enjoy the occasional companionable silence.
“A daughter should never know her mother,” I concluded. “There should be secrets.”
“I have secrets.”
“Name one.”
Lena thought hard.
“Well, one time Flanagan – hey!”
I laughed.
“Almost gotcha there,” I said.
“In your dreams,” she retorted, amused.
“Huh.”
“I think a daughter should,” Lena said, a few moments later.
“Should what?”
“Know. Her mother. Not just as a mother. As a – real person.”
I thought about that.
“Maybe,” I said.
We were silent again, for a long while.
“We could maybe be friends?” Lena said eventually.
“In your dreams.”
“Come on Artemis. Lighten up. Friends?”
“Yes. No. Maybe, if we were in a different life.”
“Or if we survive?”
“No hope of that.”
“Ah…”
Okay. I should maybe clarify my actual strategy here:
I was communing with Magog, you see, all this while, planning our attack.
Lena and I huddled, and talked, and bitched; but the larger part of my consciousness was as one with the quantum brain of the planet’s computer. Not, I must admit, conducive to great conversation, but I was doing my best.
I spoke again:
“I’m pregnant you know.”
“I know about that,” Lena said. “I was told – about that.”
“That was my motive for—”
“I know.”
“I called the child—”
“Douglas. I know.”
“You have spies everywhere, huh?”
“Pretty much. Plus—”
“What?”
“I have Tinbrain in my head.”
“Who?”
“Tinbrain is the Earth QRC. The founder quantum computing brain. The rest are really – what would you call it? Subsystems? Clones?”
“Children. Maybe. They’re certainly not clones. They’re mostly all quite different. The ones I’ve known anyway.”
I already knew this about Lena and Tinbrain. Of course I did, it’s in the book. But I should have remembered. She is like me. The only one who is like me. In having a QRC as a – friend.
“If we had a beaconband link, I could talk to Tinbrain now,” Lena mused. “And Tinbrain could talk to Magog. And Magog of course is communing with your thoughts on a second by second basis.”
My mind whirred, decoding that one.
“You’re saying, you’d be able to read my mind?”
“Only those thoughts which – yes.”
“Even the daydreams?”
“Yes.”
“Even the sexual fantasies?”
“Oh yes.”
“What kind of mother are you?”
“The worst sort,” said Lena, and she smiled. Her old wrinkled face smiled. It didn’t make her look any younger but—
She did at least look like a mother. MY mother.
“Shall we do this thing?” asked Lena.
“I’m doing it now,” I said.
Historical fact:
At the Battle of Agincourt, an army of fifteen hundred British men-at-arms and seven thousand longbowmen faced a formidable French army that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the French army, there were eight thousand men-at-arms, four thousand archers and fifteen hundred crossbowmen in the vanguard alone, with more than twice that number in the rear and on the flanks.4
In the Battle of Cúchulainn, however, it was just me and my mum, fighting against a planet full of cyborgs.
Ridiculous isn’t it? I thought so, even at the time.
“Are you in?” I asked Lena.
“I’m in,” she said, in a warm whisper that meant her voice was now inside my head. We had linked brain chips, so she too could access the cybernetic pathways of Magog, this planet’s QRC.
I knew Cúchulainn like the back of my hand. In all its wild splendour, and in all its industrial horror. From the Mountains of Marguid to the icy lakes of Garddown. And all across this once-verdant land were the hunched backs of the fabricator planets that spewed out black clouds, turning ore and mud and gas into a staggering superfluity of consumer items. The doppelgänger robots were stored here too, lined up like suits of armour awaiting ghosts to possess and locomote them.
Morgan had of course sundered the beaconband link with Earth, and his cyborgs had no need of doppelgängers. So the chassis of the DRs were unused, and forgotten about.
But now they were mine. And so the robots began to stir, controlled jointly by myself and Lena. We grabbed a thousand at a time in the fringes of our consciousness and swept them up. They flew like flocks of soulless birds across the factory lands towards Laguid. They emerged from basement vaults in the city itself, glaring and angry and dusty. They broke out of abandoned factories; they unpacked themselves from storage. And finally, they gathered together on the streets, an army fit to fight the cyborgs. Five hundred thousand robot shells; controlled by me and Lena.
And then the battle commenced.
Two Artemises, blown up by a missile fired by a seven foot high silver-skinned robot.
A dozen Morgans sundered into pieces by plasma blasts from a flock of flying doppelgängers.
A hundred Flanagans broken in the streets, after a pitched battle with a platoon of humaniform robots who fought naked, but whose bodies could withstand sustained bursts of direct plasma blast.
The Peter Smiths were slain in their thousands. The template mind there was clearly old and slow, for not a single of my doppelgängers was killed by a Peter. Lena, however, refused to kill the Smiths, just as she refused to kill the Flanagans. It made my job all the harder.
But having said that – look, I won’t deny it – I was enjoying myself. I was no longer a soldier in an army. I was the entire fucking army!
And Daxox, ah Daxox! He died again and again and again.
Picture the scene: an army in its barracks, enjoying down time. Sipping vintage wine or whisky in the club. Playing pool in the rec room. Swimming, lifting weights, or fucking in palatial bedrooms using to the full the sensory capacities of these cyborg bodies. There are Baron Lowmans galore to be found here. Peter Smiths by the score. Morgans – ah, so many Morgans. Flanagans everywhere you look. And Artemises, too, scattered among them.
And then doppelgänger robots parachute in to the barracks like blossom falling off cherry trees in spring, and a battle royal erupts. Cyborgs and doppelgängers fight hand to hand. Flanagans are blasted with explosive shells. Peter Smiths flee yowling with fear but are gunned down as they run. Morgans are incinerated by plasma bursts or pulverised by exploding bullets. And Baron Lowmans are scattered into pieces, turning the parade grounds into junkyards of cyborg body parts. A massacre.
Many massacres, all over Laguid.
More battles than the mind can conceive, in fact. I fight, I am killed, I fight again. I inhabit a thousand bodies, no ten thousand, no ten times ten thousand. I see citizens screaming with fear as I gun down the cyborgs in the streets. I shoot down heliplanes. And all doppelgänger robots are my allies, for those who I do not possess, are possessed by Lena.
It was like fighting World War III as a computer game, with real fatalities. The scope of it was – well.
I feared at one point that, like my comrades before me in the war of Invasion: Earth, I would never want to leave this hellish but addictive reality.
Morgan used hi-tech on us too of course. Satellites fired energy beams from space. Fighter craft shot us by the million. Missiles erupted among our ranks. But much of the military hardware had the potential to be doppelgänger-controlled. And so time and time again, I stole fighter planes and smart missiles from my foes and sent them back with added hate.
Then some of my doppelgängers broke into the planet’s control hub, and disabled the Nullers that kept this system isolated from the rest of humanity.
And so Magog was now able to speak across the vast reaches of space with Tinbrain, the Earth QRC. And the two giant computers joined forces, like whales singing to each other from different oceans. Or like dragons ridden by ants; as Lena and I steered and guided these vast intellects with which we were so indissolubly bonded.
And in the basement of the fabricator building, our bodies twitched and howled and grunted and our limbs flailed, as we slew and slew!
The Battle of Cúchulainn was a strange and a marvellous and a terrible affair. I remember the terror and the beauty of it all. Guns blazing. Missiles exploding. Plasma beams burning. Cyborg skin and organs melting, and their bodies being rent and smashed.
Every hour we rested, for ten minutes, in shifts. For our minds could not take the pressure of possessing so many other minds without respite. So once every hour, I would jerk myself out of the doppelgänger trance, and look around, and see Lena twitching and flailing and shouting.
I tried to sleep in those brief respites but I could not. I was too transfixed with the sight of my aged mother shouting like a mad old crone, as she sent armies of robots into battle and flew missiles and exploded bombs. Each time one of her “selves” died she shouted in rage, a death cry that chilled my blood. There were many such cries.
Then Lena’s voice would be in my head. “Time in,” she would say and I would re-enter my trance and join her once more. And, I guess, when she took her own respite she seized her chance to look at me. Her only daughter. Spasming in frenzy as I killed, as only gods should be able to kill; in many places all at the same time.
No military history has been written of this battle and nor will it ever be. Lena and I kept no records of who died and when and how and what our strategy was. And, quite deliberately, I didn’t save the battle record to chip. All I remember is that, at the time, I seemed to know what I was doing. I cross-sectioned the globe and marked off each section in my head as I cleansed it of cyborgs. I sent doppelgängers into the sewers and the sub systems and into the fibre-optic tunnels too. I used robot mosquitoes to search for hold-out Flanagans and skulking Peter Smiths. At one point the enemy even surrendered – I had a message from Daxox offering terms. But I ignored that, of course. Complete victory was the only option I would countenance.
And so it continued. As savage and bitter a doppelgänger war as Invasion: Earth, but far more upclose and personal.
In the process the planet was, I have to admit, wrecked. And there was considerable collateral damage. In other words, innocent civilians died. I couldn’t help that. It was not my fault. And they would have died anyway of course. The cyborg way is to turn all human flesh into cyborg, for they honestly think we will prefer it that way.
What else can I say? There was a long, ghastly, extraordinary conflict, but in the end, the robots of Lena and Artemis prevailed.
For there were so many of us. That’s how the Corporation had survived for so many years. Its legions of doppelgänger robots were, well, legion.
At Agincourt, the archers turned the tide of battle. Technology defeated martial prowess. But even so, soldiers fought and blades swept and warriors lost their lives.
In this battle, only machines died. Victory was achieved; but not glory.
Let me make that point again; there was no fucking glory.
“What are you going to do?” Lena asked me, anxiously.
“Ignore it.”
“Can you do that?”
I thought for a while. “No.”
One of the few surviving Morgan cyborgs had issued a challenge. He was offering a mano a mano. Me and Morgan-cyborg, in single combat, to decide the outcome of the entire battle.
“Why not?”
I thought hard on that one. “It’s the way I was raised,” I eventually said.
“Raised? On Rebus? By your father you mean?” The scorn in her tone was enough to curdle blood.
“My father was the Clan. I am a gangster, Lena. A capobastone in blood spilled. It is my code.”
“Bullshit.”
“I cannot,” I said, “refuse a direct challenge.”
And it was true. Remember, computers are just machines, which are programmed to behave in certain ways. Whereas humans are—
Yeah. You got it. Same fucking difference.
And so, like a fool. I accepted the challenge. Capobastone to capobastone, remember, for I had killed the real Daxox, thus acquiring his Clan rank.5
Lena was furious with me of course. She didn’t understand the whole business of the Clan code. But I’m stubborn. I get it, I guess, from my mother’s side.
That’s what I told Lena anyway; it’s her fault I’m such a schmuck.
And so I travelled to the Main Street of Laguid to meet Hispaniola Morgan, in a duel to the death.
Main Street is a boulevard in the centre of Laguid which is wide enough to take thousands of pedestrians at any one time. The walkways are like coloured ribbons here. Children can run the width of the boulevard by leaping from walkway to walkway, as if they were stepping stones, though it’s a dangerous business. But now the walkways had been halted. The street was deserted. The sun peeked through black clouds. Luckily I have good night vision; in Laguid, you need it in the day.
Lena was three blocks away, in a fortified hotel room, still in communion with Tinbrain and hence Magog, and able to speak to me via MI. She was my back-up in case of a double-cross. But I saw no traces of Flanagans or Daxoxes, or Peter Smiths or Baron Lowmans. Just a single Morgan, as promised, standing in Main Street, waiting for me.
“Lena,” said Hispaniola Morgan.
“I am Artemis,” I said.
“The challenge was to Lena.”
“That wasn’t clear.”
“It’s clear now.”
I shrugged. But my spirits soared. Was there a way out for me here?
“Walk away, Artemis,” said Lena in my head.
“Then the challenge is void,” I said.
“I challenge thee,” said Morgan, smiling cruelly.
Shit. He was just fucking with me.
“You can’t be serious. Walk away!”
“Weapons?” I asked.
“Knives,” Morgan replied.
I nodded. Up close, and personal, in a knife-fight that would decide the entire war. Everything to play for then. Just the way I like it.
Morgan put his rifle and pistols down on the floor. He took off his helmet. Then he stripped off his warsuit, to reveal he was wearing a Corporation Navy uniform, with a skull and crossbones sewn on the lapel.
I put down my own guns. Then took off my helmet, stripped off my warsuit. I was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. My arms were bare.
I drew my knife.
Morgan drew his knife.
We began, slowly, walking towards each other.
It was a long street. I was alert to snipers. I was on the lookout for heliplanes with missiles. I was prepared for Morgan to try and double-cross me by drawing a concealed gun. I was ready, in short, for anything.
I was barely three feet from Morgan when the mine exploded beneath me. The ground rippled and buckled as if an earthquake had smitten it. It was a bomb that ran the entire length of Main Street – fuck only knows how they’d buried it so well. And my body vanished, engulfed in the inferno.
Morgan smiled.
I tapped him on the shoulder.
The Artemis that died was a holo of course; the real me was waiting in the shadowed area behind a walkway strut for the battle to be over. I had an army of doppelgängers two blocks away, ready to pounce. But for now, it was just me and the cyborg Morgan.
“Hi,” I said.
And he turned and looked at me.
And I realised that I could smell him.
I could smell his body odour, the warrior’s rank aroma that comes from spending hours or days in a warsuit. I could see sweat beading his brow. I could see the goose bumps on his neck, from the chill wind. I could hear his heart beat. He looked at me and there was a spark of fear in his eyes.
It was Morgan. The real Morgan. What a lucky—
Morgan shot me. I was, of course, in a warsuit; so the bullet bounced off my armour. I fired once, at his face. The bullet went straight through his mouth and out the other side, but didn’t explode en route. Blood gouted out, giving him an evil bloody leer. But my second bullet missed, because Morgan was running. And a flock of Smiths and Daxoxes and Lowmans swooped out of the clouds in their black warsuits and began shooting at me, throwing off my aim and, dammit, hitting me.
I gave chase.
This was my city. I knew, as you know, every alley, every building, every cul-de, etc.
And it didn’t take long to realise that Morgan was not just running; he was luring me. Leading me to the City Hall, a perfect spot for an ambush. I knew; but I didn’t care.
I sprinted down empty motionless walkways, I vaulted walls, I saw him run up the steps to the City Hall main entrance and I allowed the door to open for him.
I ran up the steps, spattered with his blood, and reached the door and paused.
An explosion ripped the door away. Easily predicted. I ran through the smoke. The ambush I’d expected was there. Flanagans and Smiths and Daxoxes lay in wait, hiding behind statuary in this baroque headquarters of the Laguid civil service, firing bullets and energy blasts at me.
“I’ll take care of these.”
The doors opened again and an army of doppelgänger robots rattled through, silver bodied and with eerie blank faces that somehow all looked like Lena. Bullets and energy beams flew and the cavernous atrium became a war zone. The City Hall was a baroque extravaganza, with glass pilasters and nude mobiles suspended by magnets and, inevitably, a pair of matching pair of statues of Flanagan and Lena, now shattered and cracked with bullet impacts. I ignored the irony of that; and let Lena fight her virtual war with the cyborgs.
Deafened by the gunfire, buffeted by the direct hits upon my body armour, I could still manage to follow a trail of blood with my mask’s augmented vision. So I ran into the maelstrom of gunfire and energy blasts and I survived and ran up the stairs to the first floor, where giant tapestries of the founding fathers of Laguid once stood; shredded by the ricochets.
And there, I found Morgan waiting for me.
His movements were uncertain; he was clearly in considerable pain. He was carrying a Philos pistol which one of his cyborgs must have thrown to him. As soon as he saw me, he began to shoot.
It was no contest. I was in a warsuit, he was unarmoured. I walked towards him, his bullets bouncing off my armour. I could have killed him with a single shot but that wouldn’t have been sporting. But his aim, I’ll grant you that, was good; he shot me ninety-three times in a small spot in the heart region in the space of a few seconds, and it was a good chance the next bullet would break through and kill me. But still I did not shoot.
When I was close enough, I took the gun off him and crushed it in my hand.
Then I raised my helmet and took it off. I stripped out of my warsuit for the second time. I shook out my arms and took a deep breath. I drew my knife. He drew his knife.
This time was for real. He could smell my sweat; I could smell his. He was gasping, bloodily grinning. “Boss to boss,” he said, “capobastone to—”
Expecting me to be distracted by his words, Morgan drew a concealed gun from a holster above his arse and fired, in a single fast and effortless movement. I dodged the bullet, came up slashing. I slashed his throat open with my knife.
Then, tiring of the knife stuff, I picked up my own gun and delivered the coups de grâce at point-blank range, until his body was a torso with no head.
It was over. Hispaniola Morgan was dead.
Lena and I went to a bar for a drink.
“The battle not the war,” I said.
We’d been in the bar all afternoon as the fighting continued to rage outside; our minds still controlling doppelgängers on every spot on the planet.
But by the time we reached the end of the second bottle, Magog told us we had killed the last of our enemies. All the cyborgs were dead. Victory had been achieved.
We both knew, however, that there were still thousands of evil cyborg Hispaniola Morgans left on other planets in the humanverse; up to the usual no fucking good.
But do you know what? That was now someone else’s problem.
“Battle not the war,” Lena echoed. “Isn’t that always the way of it?”
We chinked glasses.
It could be years before all the Morgans were killed.6 But, we hoped, the Daxox and Flanagan and Peter Smith and Baron Lowman cyborg bodies had been created more recently. We might have seen the last of those.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did Morgan hate Flanagan so much?”
That’s when she told me the story. Of Morgan’s wife Medea, and Flanagan’s betrayal of his best friend, and Morgan’s subsequent murder of Medea. I’d half guessed it to be honest, so it didn’t come as a great reveal.
“That explains a lot,” I said, as she reached the end of her tale of treachery and soured friendship.
“Flanagan was never,” Lena admitted, “a saint.”
I laughed. “No.”
“That’s why I—”
“Yeah.”
“We always—”
“I know.”
“He was my—”
“I know he was,” I told Lena.
That’s Lena, my mother, by the way. Saviour of all humanity. Yeah, that Lena. Did I mention she was my mother? I squeezed her hand gently.
We chinked again.
“To Flanagan.”
“To the old rogue, love of my life, liar, cheat, arsehole, lover, friend, Mickey Flanagan,” said Lena.
Her cheeks were damp with tears. I was glad of that. Earlier on, when she would not cry for him – that’s when I most feared for her.
“So what next?” I said to Lena.
She drained another whisky and thought.
“I retire,” she said, at length. “Find a planet where I can be a grandmother.”
From this, I swiftly deduced her cunning plan.
“Near me?” I asked.
“If you’ll have me.”
“I’ll try to endure it.”
“Artemis—”
“No.”
“I just want to—”
“Skip it.”
“Do you forgive me? Now do you forgive me?”
“Fuck no.”
“That’ll do.”
Lena smiled. She was looking tired. And old, so very old. It was time, I realised, for her to rest.
We left the saloon and walked back down Main Street.
And that’s when it happened.
A sniper’s bullet whistled through the air, so fast we heard its flight after it hit Lena on the face mask. It was a lucky shot, her face mask was already cracked. So the bullet went through and entered her skull and then penetrated into her brain.
And there, it exploded.
I drew my gun and laced the rooftops with bullets. As I did so, I called up an army of doppelgängers who drenched the area with gunfire, and swept the sniper away. The report came back to my MI a few minutes later: the killer had been killed.
It was a cyborg Baron Lowman. Magog had been wrong; we hadn’t killed them all. This was the last.
I walked back to Lena. Her body was sprawled on the pavement, with her black warsuit armour showing through the rents and gashes in her street clothes. Her face was – gone. I kneeled down, and peered inside her mask, through the gaping hole created by the bullet. I saw nothing but blood and spattered grey tissue. I deduced there was nothing left of her brain. Which means her brainchip was gone too. Her memories. Her updated thought diary. All gone.
Lena was dead. The latest fatality of a long and soulless war.
And I never even got to say goodbye.
Lena Smith
May she rest in peace