“You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.”
“That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. “See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?”
During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations.
Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—
You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—
As I was saying …
Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!
The explosion brought the entire building down.
That’s fucking enough!
I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.
Back to start.
Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.
“Aha, the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.
I looked over the side at the blue water.
“What is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the sharks?”
She laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.”
I stood loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”
“Very well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. “You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”
“My interest is in seeing you die.”
A small smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.”
She extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.
“Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.
“I don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.
“Good. Then tell us who you are.”
I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. “I thought I had.”
“What you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”
“I bet it isn’t,” I muttered.
“We do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.”
“You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.”
It was a colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.
“It was my understanding,” said the woman quietly, “that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”
Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.
“Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.
The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally, she said, “You are aware we could erase your stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”
“They’d find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. “You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.”
“What deal?” she asked woodenly.
In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.
“There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.”
“And they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”