A screed of white noise pierced Celeste to the core.
Blackness followed – and the words were gone, lost. Agony spread. No place. This is no place. No place like home. A shiver reached all the way down to her toes. She was dead. Alone in the dark. Celeste wanted to move, to cry out. There were some words she needed to remember, to stop her from getting lost in here…
… lost where?…
Can’t remember.
Celeste closed her eyes and wished she were someplace else.
… there’s no place like home…
Opening her eyes, she found herself back inside her module.
Celeste didn’t recall coming home. There was no vestige of memory, and the Crawl was a place where memories were currency. She got to her feet, trembling. Going into the Flood was one thing, but mind and body transferring through it was something else. Impossible. She didn’t even know how she’d done it, if that was what she’d done.
She looked in the holo-mirror and saw someone else: platinum blonde, bluish neon-implant eyes, statuesque figure and face with an exotic bird’s fine bone structure. She traced the contours of the alien visage, put a hand up to her face, felt warm skin that was real yet not her own. She could feel bones and tendons inside the long, clairvoyant fingers, with elegant, particle-dusted nails. She was still the woman from the trace – outside the Flood.
How?
But, as she watched, the woman’s face degraded steadily, and her own body reasserted itself, pushing the other back out of reality. However, it’d been no overlay, no holograph; the most sophisticated hardlight projection couldn’t achieve that sense of reality – could it?
No, they could mimic weight and shape but not the warmth of a body. The feeling of tendons and the movement of bones. She was looking at herself in the mirror again – the ghost of the woman’s artificial eye colour fading away. Celeste was Celeste again, so who’d that woman been?
She sat down and tried to stop shaking, but that didn’t work, so she punched her console’s keypad until it spat out what she wanted. She crunched a black between her teeth to take the edge off. So many of her highs over the years had been manufactured that to experience a natural one felt disturbing and unreal.
Harsh sound punctured the silence.
The Mickey Mouse telephone in the corner of the module was juddering about on the spot. An ugly spider-web crack marred Mickey’s yellowed face. The dots of his eyes lit up, blinking a faltering red LED glow. He was a piece of junk she’d picked up at a trade-share. He wasn’t connected, just a curio adding colour to the grey square feet of her life. He shouldn’t be making a sound. She picked up the receiver from the cradle formed by Mickey’s ears with fingers that felt irreal and not quite her own. She listened. There was a low static hiss on the line. It was followed by a calm, measured voice that said, “Celeste Walker?”
“Yes?”
“Please be patient. We are trying to connect you.”
She heard an old-fashioned click, and the line went dead.
Chapter Nine
Celeste lay awake for the rest of the night with her head pounding, sweating cold into clinging sheets. She lay there, counting off each breath, each minute, and each hour left until the artificial dawn. The ceiling coloured with the creeping blue of insomniac night as she lay there, waiting to hear sirens, to see the red lights, waiting for her module to be dropped. Unfamiliar blood pumped through an unfamiliar heart, so it seemed. She saw the shapes and forms of her module’s space through eyes that felt wrong in a skull ill-shaped. She felt longer and thinner, shrunken and twisted up all at once. She wanted to tear her hair out at the roots and scream. Blood and violence played out behind her eyes as she scratched fingernails chewed down to the quick along arms that were hers and not hers. What’d been done to her? Why couldn’t she feel at home in her own body again?
Outside, the Crawl’s many voices, servos and engines conversed with one another like the overlapping threads of a fractured channel. She got out of the comp-couch, took out a breakfast nuke-pac from the storage compartment, and sighed.
Something had gotten to the pac.
The modules of each bloc were interconnected by a webwork of pipes, tubules, and cables that catered to the needs of the populace. Most of the pipes had become clogged and filthy like old arteries. Whatever came through was tainted by whatever had passed through before. Automated cleaning drones were supposed to detox the insta-serv pipes twenty-four-seven but, as everyone was high or switched-off in some way, who cared if the foodstuff tasted bad before getting on the hub-car for another day of Compound work?
The packaging on this one was torn, leaking tangerine fluid, and though they never smelled that good, this one’s odour was particularly foul. She’d heard several yarns about what went into nuke-pacs: leftover experiments from hi-sec labs, for one. She flushed it down the dispose and detoxed her hands with two scalding vape-blasts from the module’s steriliser tank. She felt unclean and hungry still, but that wasn’t unusual. It would take a lifetime away from the Crawl to shake those feelings off.
Today was going to be a bad day; storm warnings were already sounding out there, so she’d have to dig out her heavy gear. She hated wearing the atmos-suit. It smelled of age and the connections left her feeling like she was licking copper connectors all day. She struggled into the suit, feeling it pinch in places. She stopped herself as she was about to step into the airlock for decompress. How could she go to work like this, after what had happened?
Breda must think she’d run away mid-shift.
But then, if that was true, why hadn’t she been dropped?
She shouldn’t still be here yet she was.
None of it made sense.
Allah, she thought, goes to show how much we’re conditioned. Something like this happens to me, and I’m thinking of going to work like nothing’s changed.
The hub-car pulled up and began waiting its allotted min-and-half time before departure. Commuters pushed and shoved their way onboard. She watched them go, feeling an ache to be with them – a yearning, heedless desire, to not be here at the heart of a strangeness she couldn’t explain. A question demanded her attention: what on the Crawl are you doing? Standing here, watching, waiting, not going to work?
There were deadlines today that would be missed. A pod sitting empty in the Compound. Breda would see. That pod would no longer be hers by tomorrow morning. She was volunteering to become a zero right now, whatever happened yesterday was no longer important.
Celeste got onboard the hub-car.
She felt like she was being watched by her fellow commuters, despite everyone being anonymous and near-blind in the bulky atmos-suits.
Would you like to update status?
She ignored the CrawlSpace message, though this did not stop the cursor blinking away testily at the edge of her vision.
When she arrived at the Compound, Celeste made her way to her pod on third level. Everyone else was wired in and busy chasing. She was the last one to begin prep for the day. There was no sign of Breda. The supervisor’s cropped rust-copper hair couldn’t be seen on its usual patrol between the pod rows.
Someone else was coming down the nearest row towards her: Simran. Celeste felt her skin crawl as the v-born HR drone approached. She’d call security for sure. “Get this illegal out of here. She’s to be dropped. No more pod-work for her.”