It had been good – better than good – but now that she was fully conscious again, unease returned to the pit of her stomach. Simran was still on the couch. She hadn’t disconnected. Was she still looped in?
Celeste approached Simran, noticing the glazed shine to her eyes. The v-born’s body was trembling hard, caught up in orgasm, but shaking far too violently.
Something was wrong.
She held her hand to the v-born’s mouth and nose. No longer breathing. She checked for a heartbeat. Pulse was there as a weak thread, barely working its way through the body. Almost gone. Simran was trapped, unable to stop the loop and pull out. Blood and saliva were bubbling from her lips. The heartbeat stopped.
Celeste punched a stim-pac code into the mood-couch’s dispenser. Ripping out the plasticised patch, she placed it over Simran’s heart. It activated, jolting Simran’s body. Vital signs jumped up, spiking high, then fell away to nothing and did not return. Something had gotten into her and done this. Locked her in and killed her outright: poison code.
My bad code, Celeste thought. I should never’ve come here.
The mood-atmos generated the image of a marmalade cat, which walked out of the ether to coil around her ankles. It’d sensed her distress and was trying to comfort her. A prickling sensation, attempting to mimic the sensation of real fur, passed across her skin. She placed her hand against the blurred boundaries of the image, closed her eyes, and imagined the vibrations she could feel were animal purrs.
Celeste had heard yarns about live animals surviving in the hi-secs. There were none below. When she was little, she’d had a bio-bird: a shrunken, vat-born thing that lost all its orange-red chest feathers and darker plumage after one year and was found shrivelled up on the bottom of its cage after two. It’d been based on an extinct wintertime bird – the robin.
She remembered taking it out onto the bloc platform and letting it go, watching the small, fragile body freefall down through the grey-brown clouds that interlaced the Crawl’s network. She wondered how long it fell for, whether it ever reached ground level. She wished for its last moments to be at one with the earth – did it ever make it?
Do any of us?
Celeste threw the half-empty wine bottle at the cat, making it pixelate and disperse with a yowl. The bottle sprayed some of its contents across the module floor, then rolled away to thump in the far corner. She threw herself down on the floor and glared up at the pre-fabricated ceiling.
Letting out a deep breath to stop tears from coming, she let the pain nettle inside her breast. This was no time for a breakdown.
Celeste got up and padded to Simran’s bather cubicle, where she rummaged for a minute before digging out a strip of capsules. She broke the plastic seals with a thumbnail and counted out four pale egg-shapes, letting them rest in the palm of her hand. After considering them, she swallowed them down without water. They tasted bitter as morning, but the aching in her forehead eased up a little. She needed the pep from the pills. She’d had no compression time. She didn’t want to go into the Flood again with this bad code in her head. It was the middle of night-cycle, but she had to go to a wipe-clinic – right now.
Searching for one on CrawlSpace would be reported, but she had to do it. She looked over at Simran. A thick line of bloodied drool was running from the v-born’s mouth. That was her future, unless she did something quick. She had to do this, before anyone else got hurt – but that didn’t stop the cold feeling gathering in her gut at what she was about to do.
Tonight, she’d been higher than she’d ever been in her life, and now she was going to go lower than she’d ever gone before.
Chapter Eleven
The wipe-clinic was not a salubrious place. It smelled of stale urine and late-night vomit. The clinic foyer was a dingy module with failing lights and a secondary airlock that opened into the operating cubicles. The nurse-program flickered into existence, out-of-focus and scrambled with green-yellow noise. “Please take a seat, Miss. One of the surgeons will see you shortly.”
Celeste sat down on one of the cracked plastic seats and looked around at her fellow patients. She recognised porn-junkies from the way they twitched. Hands unstill and eyes glazed over, staring into a broken inner space they dreaded and dreamed of.
One man had a face decorated by cuts that looked self-inflicted, and bite-marks studded his forearms. Ugly scabs had formed over the wounds. His eyeballs were tattooed night-green with magenta capillary work: an aesthete-punk who’d overdone it with mood-inducer, by the look of things. Something bought through Flood-connect and delivered by infected tubule direct into his body. He was lucky he hadn’t ripped his own throat out.
The last one was a frail-looking teenage boy sitting away from the rest, arms wrapped around himself, as if he were cold. A woman with a face cut from stone sat next to him: mother and son. The boy must be a creative, a thinker. They never did well for long. This might be his first time out of module; most children didn’t leave until working age. Before then, the CIs recommended total immersion in the Flood until age five, then alternate periods for adjustment to Crawl-life, until they could start work at age fifteen. That meant a lot of years spent in a small box with at least two other people. It drilled in conformity and left little room for individuality, let alone for alternative thought patterns to grow or flourish.
This one must be developing in some way though. So, Mom was bringing him to the wipe-clinic to start over from scratch. Removing bad code was one thing, but removing complete organic thought processes was another. Mom was doing the best for him, but Celeste knew the boy wouldn’t be able to remember his own name, how to speak, or how to shit by the time he left the clinic. He’d never work Compound. He’d be a vegetable until they gave him a sleep-stim overdose to end it all. Mom must truly love her son, bigly much. What a future awaited him.
The nurse-program’s stuttering face materialised before Celeste. “Which service do you require? Standard or deluxe?”
“Standard.”
“This way. Please follow–follow me.”
Celeste got to her feet and followed the free-roaming holo-face, watching as its ageing light-bee darted about inside to maintain the image as best it could.
“Standard cubicle thirteen-nine please.” The holo-nurse crackled.
The cubicle cycled halfway open, jammed, shook, then finished opening.
Celeste looked inside saw a gurney with heavy-duty straps and clamps mounted onto a rust-flecked frame – a real old-time relic. Scuff-marks and gouges on the cubicle walls recorded past struggles. Spatters of a dried copper shade were everywhere.
“I think there’s been a mistake.”
The yarns she’d heard about the clinics were true. This place was for butchery, not surgery. There was someone big standing behind her.
“No mistake, Miss Walker.”
A needle punctured her neck, injecting a silky coolness that numbed her brain and introduced her to a black silence deeper than any administered by a comp-couch.
Celeste awoke strapped to the gurney. Shapes moved around her. Her head was fuzzy. Her tongue was heavy and her throat too dry and tight to scream. They appeared human, although they were dressed in dirty whites and their eyes shone bright. Men in surgical coats wearing goggles and facemasks. Like the nightmare trace. The one where something had been put inside her.