Her thoughts were too cluttered and jumbled up to focus. Her mind wouldn’t empty and smooth out as she needed it to.
“Walker,” Simran said, nodding acknowledgment. The v-born wasn’t dressed in the rainbow fibe-suit today. She was in management black with hair pulled back tight into a ponytail. Even her lips were tinted with black gloss. A whole new look.
“What happened to Breda?” Celeste asked. It was all she could think of to say.
Simran blinked a couple of times; vat-born brains processed slow sometimes. “Moved on. The senior co-ordinator decided it was time for new blood. I’ve been promoed up from HR.”
‘Moved on’ was one of many synonyms for being zeroed and dropped. What could Breda have done to deserve such a fate? Celeste’s feelings for the woman were few, but still she wondered. Breda had been a stickler for punctuality, record-keeping, and ticking all boxes when it came to organisational minutiae. She couldn’t imagine Breda being a transgressor – and it wasn’t usual for someone to get what they deserved in the Crawl. That wasn’t how life worked. Simran hadn’t moved on, though. Instead, she leaned into the pod and whispered, “I know you were late in. We received the report when you didn’t update status on CrawlSpace.” She paused. “But that’s okay, I have a proposition for you. Hold out your hand.”
Celeste did as she was told.
Simran put something in Celeste’s hand discreetly, smiled, and walked away.
Celeste looked at what had been handed to her. It was a hi-sec access-strip – for Simran’s module. She’d heard about offers like this being made to subordinates but never thought it’d happen to her, especially as she was almost five past the thirty-five.
Celeste looked after Simran, askance.
Simran looked back at her. “See you later. Have a good shift.”
This shouldn’t be happening. She had to go to a wipe-clinic after shift, not Simran’s module. Something was deeply wrong with her. Perception. Recognition. Comprehension. All must be fried. Seeing herself as someone else. Losing memory of returning to her module. The voice on the unconnected telephone. Whatever happened yesterday in that trace was deep anomaly, and she needed to get it fixed. Bad code could be eating up her brain and wasting her soulwire down to nothing. But she couldn’t do timeout to go to the clinic right now. She was on shift and had to work, bad code on the brain or not. She couldn’t duck out on Simran’s invitation though. And, if she didn’t risk a wipe-clinic, she could be dead on her comp-couch come the next morn.
Fuck-fuck-fuck!
Celeste tried to clear her mind and get into the right headspace for a chase. After what happened yesterday, she didn’t need another negative experience.
She connected and dived into the Flood.
A flicker of light followed by tones bled from metal stung her eyes. The smell of ozone made her nostrils sore. This was not where she was meant to be; there’d been no sense of upload. She’d not even sought out a trace. No sign of the Flood’s web visualisation anywhere. She’d gone direct to this, whatever it was. Something corrupt inside me, she thought. I’m lost – being swallowed and rewritten by bad code.
Her body felt dead and numb. She squinted into the shadows that surrounded her. They were occupied. More than one presence there, yet all were part of one another. When they moved, they made soft sounds. They were tall, whoever they were, and their eyes had no pupils and glowed like neon bulbs. Loose folds of wrinkled surgical robes undulated in the gloom. Their fingers felt like they had no bones when they caressed her. The metal surface she was laid out upon could have been a mortuary slab. It was cold, and they were cold. There seemed no end to the cold and the dark here.
Celeste could think and breathe – that was all. She could see no core to this trace, no personality imprint making itself known. These men were shades imagined, conducting a behaviour sequence yet there was nothing here to guide them. This was wild. Total rogue data. The memory-aspects of the trace could not govern how it played out because there was nothing here. No intelligence. Dead space.
I am lost. I’ve become one with the core of a trace. I’m adrift in the Flood. I’ll never leave until another chaser finds and defuses me. And then I’ll be dead. Gone. It could take weeks, months, years for that to happen. It could’ve been done already. For me, it will always seem like now. No real time passes in a trace. It’s memory after all and memories never change; they just degrade over time. Photographs of photographs of photographs, retaking themselves each time we relive them until there’s only blurs, shapes, and shadows left to be seen.
Uncaring fingers pinched and plied at her.
… there’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…
The words were a series of dead syllables ringing inside her brain, achieving nothing. Disconnect was down. There was no offline here. She was stuck in this trace.
A light was descending, bright and intense. She could feel its heat on the skin of her forehead, burning away flesh, cutting through to the bone. Her mouth made the shape of a scream, and a tear crept out of a paralysed eye. It hurt so much. It cut through bone until her skull was open. Pain became greyness resonating off walls she couldn’t see.
… no place… no place… no place like home…
Their fingers were examining the wound made by the light. They talked about it, as something descended that was not of the light. It glistened and wept. It looked like a length of machine-tubing, but writhed with the strength of life. Their fingers guided it until it was touching the wound made in her forehead, closing soft, perished lips over it without a sound. It suckled at the blood gathering in the sawn hole. She felt a tongue-like protrusion passing over the folds of her brain, stroking its furrows, delicately exploring, deeply intruding. A shiver reached down to her frozen toes. No more. Please, no more. No deeper, please no more.
A tension was building in the thing. Growing. Fluctuating. Fluidic engines churned, shuddering into life. A hush fell among the surgeons. The wan light in their bulbous eyes went out, one by one, leaving her alone with the weeping machine. A screed of violence pierced her to the core, making her spine arch harshly away from the metal slab beneath. The tongue thrust in through her skull and penetrated deep into her cortex. Watery sediment ran out and down into her eyes. It stung and smelled of long-dead minerals. It tasted of raw salt and bitumen.
The tongue went limp and slack after its discharge. The weeping machine withdrew, receding back from whence it came. Sensation returned to her. Feeling. Her fingers twitched. Her toes grasped at the air. She could feel the hole in her head and knew the tongue had put something in there. Something living. A seed.
Celeste opened her eyes.
She disconnected from the Flood. Tentatively, she probed her forehead for signs of a wound. Nothing – of course, there was nothing. That trace was real nasty. Proper full-blown horrorshow. No real harm done, maybe, but something was going on. Bad traces escalating, and they were all finding her. Homing in. Like someone was directing them. That couldn’t be true though, could it? That was FakeNews talk. OpinionEd thinking.
First, the party. Then, the restaurant where everyone died. Now, this crazy nightmare shit.
What’s happening to me? The end-shift siren sounded. Celeste had never felt more grateful to be leaving her pod and the Compound behind. There was a taste at the back of her throat. Old copper. Blood. It told her she probably wouldn’t be coming back here again, and she believed it.