‘Minibar, bathroom,’ said the porter, pointing. ‘Touch your hand here.’ There was a white square on the wall by the door. Jack pushed his fingertips against it and it flashed.
‘The door’s set for you.’
‘Any room service?’
The porter laughed.
‘What about opening the window?’
‘That’s extra.’
‘That’s not what Charlie said.’
‘Charlie’s smashed. Just pay onweave.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Oh, I forgot.’
The porter cackled to himself as he shuffled away down the corridor. [ I’d let you break his life, but it’s already broken,] thought Jack.
[ I could take him lower.]
[Can you crack the room?]
[ Jack, this is a shitty room in a flophouse. If I was free I could crack every sodding rathole for half a kilometre without breaking a sweat.]
[ Fist.]
[ Yes, I can. It’s a local system. No need to go onweave, so it won’t trigger the cageware alarms. A minute or two, and I’ll own their server too.]
[ No quicker?]
[ The cage. It’s like wading through mud. Still, it’ll give you a minute to hang up your shirts and unpack your wash bag.]
[Do it.]
Fist flickered into being and went to work. Jack thought of him free and at war, a little black shape carved out of darkness, giggling as he shattered artificial minds in the voids beyond Jupiter. Now he was so much more limited. He moved to the centre of the small room and knelt down. ‘I just need to reach in,’ he explained, splaying his hands on the floor. He shimmered slightly, resources drained by the effort of breaking through his cage, then muttered ‘gotcha’. His fingers sank into the stained carpet, a visual metaphor for deep and subtle combat between invasive and defensive coding sets.
The other puppets had always looked down on Fist. Grown on an accountant’s rather than a soldier’s mind, they’d perceived him as a flawed weapon, one rooted in barren civilian ground. Jack had had to deal with similar contempt from his own peers. In his own case, he’d had to admit that they were partially right. He wasn’t a trained soldier and he didn’t adapt well to military life. But he’d never felt anything other than deep respect for the ease with which Fist penetrated and subverted complex information structures.
That admiration came from Jack’s sense of the limits of his own professional skills. He could read and understand commercial systems, even – to an extent – hack his way into and through them himself. He loved to follow number and data flows, reading the health of a company from the trails they left behind. But at an absolute level he lacked the carving fluency of engagement that was hard-wired into Fist’s deepest being. Not for the first time, he wondered what such intimacy with the abstract felt like.
‘Got the window,’ grunted Fist. Unreal ripples span away from him, rolling lazily across the carpet. They died to nothing before they reached Jack. Hidden machineries groaned into action, and the floor’s movement shifted from virtual to real. External blinds irised open. Suddenly Fist was kneeling on a rapidly expanding circle of stars. The pool of darkness spilled out across the empty room. He stood up, a little prince suspended above the kingdom he’d lost.
‘That’s better,’ he said happily.
For both of them, it was a kind of homecoming, a return to the violent emptiness of space. Jack stepped forward and looked down. He was standing on the edge of the window, the point where scabbed flooring gave way to black infinity. For a moment he could pretend that he was no longer staying in a cheap hotel in the Wound, but floating between solar systems. Earth – ruined and abandoned – wasn’t visible. There were no snowflakes, only the hard, tiny stars, barely present in light millennia of void.
‘I always dreamed of coming back home,’ he said, wistfully. ‘But when we arrived on-Station, I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t bear to see no stars, just the Spine and the rest of Homelands curving round behind it.’
Fist ignored him. He moved to the wall, his hands eddying across it, caressing the virtual structures that underpinned the room. ‘I’m going to get full overlay going,’ he said. Jack looked up, away from the stars. ‘Is that safe?’ he asked.
Fist sighed. ‘Fuck’s sake, Jack, have some faith. I’m using the hotel server to mask our call to your old messaging space. As long as we don’t go further into the weave, it’ll look like you’re just using a keyboard and a screen.’
‘Does anyone even have those any more?’
The walls and the ceiling rippled out of existence as the room’s overlay systems meshed with Jack’s mind. He was standing in the ruins of a garden, at the edge of a pool made of darkness. A full moon hung above it, suffusing tangled flowerbeds, overgrown paths and broken archways with a soft, forgiving light. In the distance, there was a small hill. A little temple set on its peak, classically Greek in style, shone like a silver button. A figure that could have been a statue stood next to it.
The garden had a vague, tumbled beauty to it. Remembering how it looked when he had tended it daily, Jack sighed. He thought of the farewell party he’d thrown. The few friends and colleagues who’d turned up had pretended to be proud of him. He was going to fight the Totality, to avenge the dead children of the moon. But as the drink flowed, their relief that their patrons hadn’t blessed them with similar postings began to show through.
Fist emerged from an archway on the other side of the pond, his wooden shoes clacking on paving stones like hooves. Jack’s library had been through there. He was sure that, in surrendering to the Totality, he’d broken the conditions of his media content licence. The library would now be empty, a lifetime of reading, watching and listening lost.
Fist’s red painted lips slid into a grimacing smile. ‘Don’t move, Jack,’ he called over. ‘Haven’t switched you to lucid weavestate yet. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy watching you bump into walls, but got to protect my future property.’
He closed his eyes for a moment. Jack imagined him frowning in concentration. The puppet’s face was too rigid to show such a subtle emotion. Jack wondered how Fist would cope with a real, human face, when the time came. He felt briefly pleased that he could set Fist’s gleeful anticipation aside and think about his own death so dispassionately. Andrea had pointed out how passive the puppet’s role in it really was. Now Jack usually tried to imagine that he was suffering from a disease that would take his life in an efficient and entirely impersonal way. That hadn’t always been easy, but it was something that – most of the time – he could manage.
The landscape shimmered briefly and then was still. ‘There!’ chirped Fist. ‘Motor neuron management systems patched in. The Night Hag’ll activate automatically from now on. You’re fine to move, it’s all just subjective.’
Jack took one experimental step, then another. The weave reached deep into his cerebrum, making imagined action seem entirely real. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt for seven years. Once, it had permeated his life. It had taken a long time to learn how to leave it behind, to let go of all that it had underpinned. The experience of that letting go had helped him as he’d grappled with the greater loss he would soon face. That, and the promise of some small happiness with Andrea, in the few months that remained to him.
‘Now we’re here,’ Fist said obliviously, ‘let’s get social!’ He skipped over to a roughly hacked block of soft white limestone that stood at the heart of the garden. ‘That was your dad, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Fist affected an archaic accent. Jack didn’t recognise it. ‘He’s blocked you good and proper, guv’nor. Want me to try and open him up? You can surprise him.’