“Glad to find I was on the entrance list for the House of Kieth,” I drawled. “Get a Vid in here, okay? We need to know what’s going on.” As we approached, I realized that one of the pieces of equipment was the Monk, standing perfectly still in the focus of the lights. Its face had been removed, and its torso remained exposed. “Is it… functional?”
Kieth glanced at it. “Sure is. We’ve been doing a lot of work with Brother West, Cates. I think you’re going to be amazed.” He glanced around. “Nice digs, eh? Between Ty and the Twins, we’ve rewired this whole thing and the suits that own this place don’t know a damn thing! Fully shielded: We could set the place on fire and the SSF satellites wouldn’t know it for days. There are five Droids, by the way. Ty calls them Bob. Bob One, Bob Two, like that. This is where they used to assemble Droids. You can see where the lines used to be.”
I walked up to Brother West and stood in front of him. “What’s up with him?”
Kieth sprang into animation, jumping up, wiping his hands on a rag, and running over to one of the black boxes. “He’s fine, Mr. Cates, just fine. Ty’s had a lot of time to dig around in there. Found the behavioral modification chip, learned how to selectively disable it. Want to see?”
I nodded. “Very much.”
Although the back of its skull still looked normal enough, from the front the Monk looked totally inhuman, a mass of wires and boards for a face with two delicate cameras where the eyes should be. It stood ramrod straight. I wondered who West had been. The Electric Church seemed to draw most of its converts from the lower classes, criminals and the working destitute. West might have been someone I’d known, or someone like someone I’d known. I wondered if he’d gotten what he wanted. Or deserved.
Kieth fiddled with his equipment and began punching into a small keyboard. “All right,” he said, “meet Mr. West.”
The Monk spasmed, twitched, and fell to its knees with a shriek. Its hands came up and began pounding on its skull violently.
“Let me out,” it said, its voice perfectly modulated and sounding strangely reasonable. As it continued to speak, the reasonable tone gave way to increasing volume and a ragged quality that made my skin crawl. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
I reached for my gun. It wasn’t there. I’d had to chuck it to get on the hover.
“It’s okay!” Kieth shouted over the Monk’s din. “It can’t activate its weapons.” He paused to stare at the Monk with me. “This is Mr. West, Cates. This is what’s going on inside his brain right now. After some analysis, Ty doesn’t believe his mental operations are damaged, he simply believes being a Monk is too much to process. In short, the mod chip eliminates free will, Mr. Cates, but once it is removed there’s a viable person in there. It’s just a viable person who’s been driven mad by the process, and who knows how many months or years of being enslaved.”
“Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-”
I flinched away from it. “Goddamn it, Kieth, can’t you shut it up? I get the point.”
He nodded, but didn’t move. “Mr. Gatz?”
I glanced sharply at Kev, who unfolded himself and stepped forward, stiff and ponderous. “Kev? What the fuck?”
Kieth held up a hand. “Watch.”
Kev stepped in front of me and removed his glasses. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the Monk calmed, until it was completely silent, its arms raised, its body stiff and kneeling. After a few more seconds, it climbed to its feet again and resumed attention.
“Kev can Push a Monk?”
Kieth nodded slowly. “It appears that the only requirement for Mr. Gatz’s ability is a human brain. And proximity.”
I blinked. “But it doesn’t have eyes.”
“Ty’s belief is that Mr. Gatz uses the eye-to-eye contact as a focus. It isn’t physically required.”
Gatz spoke slowly. “I noticed it first in Newark. When the Monk showed up, I was so fucking terrified I started Pushing without even realizing it. And I could swear for a second I almost had that Monk by the short hairs, that it hesitated because I was Pushing it.” He glanced back at me with naked eyes and I flinched. “Wanna talk to Mr. West?”
I nodded, my brain disconnected from the rest of me by the stress of processing all of this new information-as if there wasn’t sufficient wattage left to manage anything else. After a moment I realized that my hands were rubbing themselves nervously together. I had to concentrate to stop it.
Gatz nodded, looked at the Monk. “Say something, West.”
The Monk twitched again, and then turned its head to look in my direction. I had the eerie feeling of being stared at by something eyeless. It wiggled a little, as if losing its balance, and then nodded its head.
“For God’s sake,” it said, its voice terribly perfect, smooth and on-pitch, still processed by whatever hardware was built into its artificial skull. “Kill me. Kill me now. I beg of you.”
XIX
WHY AM I STILL ALIVE?
I stepped into the gutted kitchen area, where Milton and Tanner had scrounged a few crates together into a makeshift table and stored our meager food supplies. Food was hard to come by. Mostly, we had nutrient tablets, the kind they handed out now and then in New York when local aristocrats were moved to keep the peasant population alive for a few more weeks, for whatever obscure reasons really rich people had. The tablets kept you going, but left hunger gnawing at you. It was like starving to death forever.
Milton sat on some boxes, taking a pull from a gleaming flask. She glanced up at me from her spot at the crates and grinned. “Cheerful fucker, isn’t he?”
I gestured at the bottle she was drinking from. “Give me a blast.”
She handed it over. “Gearing up for the interrogation, eh? That’s what we figured you’d do.”
I nodded, sitting down on a box and taking a long swallow of liquor. It tasted like gasoline. I held it in by sheer will and after a moment the burning was replaced by warmth and I risked a second swallow before handing it back. “Kieth can’t guarantee West’s brain will last very long once it’s unfettered from the mod chip. Gatz seems to be able to force lucidity onto it, but who knows how long he’ll be able to manage. We need information.” I coughed. “Someone will need to sit in and take notes. Kev’s illiterate, I think, and Ty will be busy, so that leaves you or your sister.”
She winked. “Way ahead of you, chief. Why do you think I’m in here getting drunk? It’s like talking to a ghost.”
I stared at the rough wood of the crates. “You believe in shit like that?”
She slid the bottle in front of me, and I took another drink. It was starting to taste better. “Like ghosts? Like a soul?” Milton’s voice disappeared under the edge of the crate as she stretched out on the floor. “Sure I do, Mr. Cates. How can you not? All those prophecies are coming true.”
I swallowed wrong and had to cough to clear my windpipe. “Prophecies?”
“Fucking pagan.” She sighed. “Revelations. Catholic dogma. Most religions have something similar. Isn’t it obvious? We’re in the End Times.”
I stared at the bottle. Milton’s hand appeared over the edge of the crate and waved around lazily until I handed it back.
“Think about it, Cates. The dead are walking the Earth inside those air-cooled Monk bodies. You can’t get a doctor to look at you or buy something high-end unless you have one of those chips under your scalp. I’m telling you, it’s near over.”
I stood up. “Well then, we have nothing more to worry about.”
“Hey, Cates?”
“Yeah?”
“Make me a promise. I know we aren’t friends or anything, but promise me something human to human. Promise me you’ll blow my brains out before letting them Monk me. And my sister. Okay?”