When they reached the hotel, Charles was on duty. His eyes lit up as he saw Jack, sparkling with irrepressible joy. ‘Oh, hello!’ he cooed. His shirt was brightly decorated with endlessly overlapping flowers. To Jack, it felt like a violent assault. He took an awkward step and nearly fell. ‘Dear me, just look at you!’ Charles rushed round from the desk and put an arm round him, steadying him. ‘Poor you. Been overdoing the sauce? I daresay we all deserve a night on the tiles from time to time.’
Jack leant heavily on him as they stumbled down to his room. Charles’ frail body bent and swayed, barely equal to the task of supporting him. Up close, his skin had a light, waxy sheen. There was a scent of gin to him. When they reached Jack’s room, Fist slipped briefly into control again, standing Jack up and walking him to his bed. Charles hovered solicitously at the doorway, his face filled with genuine concern. ‘Thank you, Fist,’ Jack muttered, forgetting that he was speaking aloud. ‘That’s the little man who lives in you, isn’t it?’ asked Charles. Jack collapsed on to the bed as Fist slipped back into the depths of his mind. ‘It must be so nice, to have company like that,’ whispered Charles sadly. And then he made himself beam again. He fussed merrily about the room, arranging blankets round Jack and pouring a glass of water for the bedside table. He sang out, ‘Cheerio!’ as the door slammed behind him.
Fist stayed hidden away. Jack tumbled into sleep. His dreams were suffused with the memories that East had forced so deeply into his head. They were the raw stuff of Corazon’s dataself, the wholly recorded conscious experience that both informed and was created by the weave presence that had surrounded her in life. Jack’s mind snatched at them, pulling them into coherence then integrating them with his own consciousness.
He dreamed that he was leaving InSec, buying food, licensing steak and chicken flavour packs, chatting with a friend. Each moment was part of a broader association set, and so triggered related memories as Jack experienced it. Irin Lestak drank coffee. Corazon trusted her. A hovercar skimmed overhead. This year’s new models would be out soon. Last week’s soup was delicious. The vegetables in her fridge had gone off. The friend was dating a very good-looking man. They should go out for cocktails and a chat. And so it went on.
At last the day ended and Corazon slept. Her dreams pulsed through Jack’s dreaming mind, creating imaginative feedback loops. He felt Fist step into and damp down the memory stream, making sure it didn’t overwhelm him. Again, there was that new sense of care. Even in sleep it surprised him. As the feedback loops faded, Jack realised that he’d stepped beyond dreaming into a new, lucid state of imaginative self-management.
He pulled himself out of the Corazon memory stream and examined it from outside. It was a profoundly complex tangle of interlinked association sets. Jack reached for a simpler, more linear way of viewing them. They resolved into a series of specific incidents, arranged in order of occurrence. Focusing on a particular incident would trigger its playback. Wanting to avoid the trauma of her death until he was acclimatised to her presence, Jack ran through key moments in the twenty-four hours before it. He found himself talking to her. Watching from her point of view, he marvelled at how well she’d overcome her fear and loss as her faith in the Pantheon shattered.
At last, he felt ready to experience the moment of her murder. Fist pricked into alertness, ready to snap into action if the past became too brutal to bear. But there should be no deep pain. Corazon had been shot in the head and died almost instantly. Her body had shown no sign of any other injuries. There was a void where remembrance ended. Jack sited himself a little way before it and let time begin again.
There was the soft wrapping of sheets around her, then slumbering shapes in the gloom and a feeling of dazed half-awakeness as she snatched at the weave and found that it was missing from her senses. The loud knocking that had woken her continued. A voice shouted ‘InSec business, Lieutenant Corazon,’ then a code word. She assumed a weavecrash and an emergency summons to work. Soon she’d be helping clear up the inevitable riot as people lost themselves in a protective combination of rage and fear. It was never easy to face the world as it was, not as they wanted it to be.
Soft T-shirt fabric moved against her as she stood up. She pulled on her even softer dressing gown. Lights glowed into life as she walked to her front door and bent down to peer through its spyhole. There was nothing outside that she understood as a threat, just someone with blue hair, pale skin to match and a soft purple light in her eyes.
Jack was pulled out of the dream for a moment as he recognised the woman who’d shot David Nihal. A man stood behind her. Corazon snatched a glimpse of a sharp suit and a precise moustache before her view of them both was suddenly obscured. Jack winced as he remembered panthers.
Then a huge, all-consuming pain took him as he was shot in the head for the second time. For a moment the world was nothing but the dying roar of a bullet blasting through a spyhole. The door spun away and a wall fell past. Corazon gazed up at soft ceiling lights. Then the last images her eyes had made faded, and there was very nearly peace. Nothing remained but the static hiss of technology, still yearning for the vivid whisperings of synapses, axons and neurons. But there was no input left for it to gently touch at, and record.
Chapter 24
[ Wake up! Wake up!]
Fist was shaking Jack’s shoulder.
[ What? Hell!]
Jack’s head thumped with the pressure of fresh memories, with deep Pantheonware still unpacking itself into his psyche.
[ InSec outside! They’re raiding us. Shit!]
Jack sat up. The room spun. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was waking as himself, or as a woman in soft sheets in the luxury of a Homelands condominium. The puddle of stars in the hotel floor brought him back to reality. Corazon’s ghost left his mind. East was still present to him. The tawdry hotel furniture glittered in a new way.
[ We’ve got to get out, Jack. What if they know I’m uncaged?]
[ They can’t know that. What can you see?]
[Lestak and three snatch teams. Two out front, one at back. Just getting into position. A minute and they’re in the room.]
[Let’s go.]
Jack had passed out fully clothed. He was at the door then sprinting down the corridor, Fist running along behind him.
[ Back way?] Jack panted.
[Dead ahead, up the service stairs.]
They were steep and narrow. The walls were stained dark at shoulder height. They reached an emergency exit door. Jack opened it a crack. He saw a long, covered alleyway. There was bright morning light at the end of it, and the silhouettes of three men.
[One of the squads, Jack.]
[Can you offweave them?]
[ Yes, but you know the protocols. They might miss a check in. That’ll trigger every alarm they’ve got.]
[Shit.]
[ I can climb inside their heads and fuck them right up.]
[ I don’t want to harm them.]
[Sentimental. What about all that Eastware? Must be something useful there.]
Jack pushed his attention into the headache that still gripped his mind. It was like probing a fresh wound with a stick. There was pain, but Fist was right. Jack found a thread he could pull on to reach an entirely new way of being himself. East’s Pantheonware flooded his limbic system, setting up subtle overrides, rewriting his body language, reskinning his oral intonation patterns. There was a gauge that measured ‘presence’, set amongst others that included ‘impact’, ‘charm’ and ‘memorability’. A thought pushed them all to one hundred per cent. Then Jack raised himself to his full height, opened the door wide and set off towards the snatch squad.
[ Fuck’s sake, Jack,] said Fist. [ We’re going to get caught. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?]