“You’re not a dolphin, and you’re not some augmented wannabe either. You’re natural. Just the way I like it. And you know what?”
“What?”
“You’re going to keep up with them. You always do.”
Not always, he thought.
“You should come back,” he said suddenly. Somewhere far away, his fingers and toes tingled faintly.
She shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”
“Nobody’s saying you have to go back to the job. There are a million other options.”
“In here,” she told him, “there are a billion.”
He looked at her chain. He had never consciously forged those links. He’d simply found her like this. He could have changed her circumstance with a thought, of course, as he could change anything in this world—but there were always risks.
He’d learned not to push it.
“You can’t like it here,” he said quietly.
She laughed. “Why not? I didn’t put that thing on.”
“But—” His temples throbbed. He willed them to stop.
“Dan,” she said gently, “You can keep up out there. I can’t.”
The tingling intensified in his extremities. Rho’s face wavered before him, fading to black. He couldn’t keep her together much longer. All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics—they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside. Headaches. Pins and needles. They distracted from his own contrivance; suddenly the whole façade was falling apart around him. “Come back soon,” his wife called through the rising static. “I’ll be waiting…”
She was gone before he could answer. He tried to construct something spectacular—the implosion of Heaven itself, a fiery inward collapse toward some ravenous singularity deep below the Canadian Shield—but he was rising too fast toward the light.
There’d been a time when he’d derided his own lack of imagination, cursed his inability to slip his shackles and just dream like everyone else, with glorious hallucinogenic abandon. Even now, sometimes, he had to remind himself: it wasn’t a failing at all. It was a strength.
Even in sleep, Dan Brüks didn’t take anything on faith.
TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD.
SUNSHINE STABBED HIS eyes through the cell’s slotted window. His mouth was dry, his head athrob. His fingers pulsed with dull electricity. Slept on my hands, he thought, and tried to imagine how he might have actually done that as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
The same pins and needles flooded the soles of his feet when he planted them on the floor.
Great.
He found his way to the lav that Luckett had shown him the night before, emptied his bladder while every extremity tingled and burned. The discomfort was beginning to fade by the time he flushed; he headed off down the empty hall in search of other warm bodies, only slightly unsteady on his feet.
Something thumped behind one of the closed doors. He paused for a moment before continuing, his attention drawn by another door opening farther down the hall.
By the naked blotchy thing that fell into view, choking and twitching as if electrocuted.
He stood there for a moment, shocked into paralysis. Then he was moving again, his own trivial discomfort forgotten in a greater shock of recognition: Masaso the scarecrow, back arched, teeth bared, flesh stretched so tight across cheekbones that it was a wonder his face hadn’t split down the middle. Brüks was almost at the man’s side before realization stopped him in his tracks.
Every muscle thrown into tetany. This was some kind of motor disorder.
This was neurological.
The pins and needles were back in full force. Brüks looked down in disbelief at his own fingertips. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop them from trembling.
When the screaming started, he barely heard it.
Whatever it was, it killed quietly. For the most part.
Not because it was painless. Its victims staggered from hiding and thrashed on the floors, faces twisted into agonized devil masks. Even the dead kept them on: veins bulging, eyes splattered crimson with pinpoint embolisms, each face frozen in the same calcified rictus. Not a word, not a groan from any of them. There was nothing he could do but step over the bodies as he tracked that lone voice screaming somewhere ahead; nothing he could feel but that terrifying electricity growing in his fingers and toes; nothing he could think but It’s in me too it’s in me too it’s in me too—
Creatures in formation rounded the corner ahead of him: four human bodies moving in perfect step, more live than the bodies on the floor, just as dead inside. Valerie kept pace in their midst. Four sets of jiggling eyes locked on to Brüks for an instant, then resumed their frantic omnidirectional dance. Valerie didn’t even look in his direction. She moved as if spring-loaded, as if her joints were subtly out of place. One of her zombies was missing below the knees; the carbon prosthetics it used for legs squeaked softly against the floor as they approached. Apart from that subtle friction, Brüks couldn’t hear so much as a footfall from any of them. He flattened instinctively against the wall, praying to some Pleistocene god for invisibility—or at least, for insignificance. Valerie swept abreast of him, eyes straight ahead.
Brüks squeezed his eyes shut. Soft screams filled the darkness. He felt a small distant pride that none of them came from him. When he opened his eyes again the monster was gone.
The screaming had grown fainter. More—intimate. Some horrific lighthouse beacon running low on batteries, calling through the fog of war. Except this was no fucking war: this was a massacre, this was one tribe of giants slaughtering another, and any baseline fossil stupid enough to get caught underfoot didn’t even rate the brutal mercy of a slashed throat on the battlefield.
Welcome to the armistice.
He followed the sound. He doubted there was anything he could do—euthanasia, perhaps—but if it could scream, maybe it could talk. Maybe it could tell him—something…
It already had, in a way. It had told him that all victims were not equal in the eyes of this pestilence. All the Bicamerals he’d seen so far seemed to have fallen within minutes of each other, seized by the throat and turned to tortured stone before they’d even had a chance to cry out. Not everyone, though. Not the vampire and her minions. Not the screamer. Not Dan Brüks.
Not yet.
But he was infected, oh yes he was. Something was at work on his distal circuitry, shorting out his fine motor control, working its way up the main cables. Maybe the screamer was just a little farther along. Maybe the screamer was Daniel Brüks in another ten minutes.
Maybe it was right here, behind this door.
Brüks pushed it open.
Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.
The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.