The first thing that happened was more of the pink sounds. Then they stopped, and I turned to see something sitting in front of me. It was about three feet tall, and made of metal. A large number of complex arms jutted out of various parts of its main body, all of which ended in manipulating extensions. The body itself was battered and heavily patched, as if it had been repaired time and time again. At the top of the whole affair was a headlike structure which was glaring at me.
“Er, hi,” I said.
“I’m working as fast as I can!” the thing shouted. The voice, as well as looking very deep blue, sounded a little strange. Mechanical, not very human at all, though it was certainly a beautiful color. “I don’t have the firmware!”
“Bummer,” I said, trying to be helpful without getting involved in a long conversation. I could feel the beginnings of the second Rapt rush lumbering toward me, and wanted to be a long way from here when it hit.
“Actually, I don’t even think it’s “ware at all,” the machine said, confidentially. “Just processing power. I’m by myself, you know, completely and utterly by myself.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.
“No, you don’t!” the machine shouted, seeing through me instantly. “You don’t see at all. You’ve just been sent to spy on me!”
“I haven’t,” I said plaintively. The big rush was now definitely on the way. “Honestly. I’m just lost.”
“Lost my ass, you bastard.”
“Please, I’ll leave you to get on with whatever the hell it is you’re doing if you’ll just tell me how to get up a level.”
“Turn around, go 46.23 meters, turn left, 21.11 meters, right 7.89 meters, climb up the panel with the ladder on it,” said the machine, almost too fast for me to make out. “Now piss off and let me get on with my work.”
And then the second rush came, like a sudden fall of night. Moving with all the verve of a potato I followed the machine’s instructions as closely as I could, though possibly not to the second decimal place. By then I’d realized that the machine hadn’t existed anywhere outside my head, but I reasoned that it was possibly a mechanism for my subconscious to tell me how the hell to get out. I was impressed with my subconscious for even attempting such a thing, and decided I should follow its instructions. I felt I owed it to myself, and that if I turned out to be right I probably deserved a prize. Like a little more Rapt.
I eventually seemed to find myself out of the exhaust and up a level, and from there I floundered my way into the service corridor and thus out toward my standard exit. The guys at the door bade me a cheery hello, but I couldn’t even see them by then. Everything was pressed in too hard, and everything was very black. I stumbled down cobbled streets which seemed to have turned into tunnels, aware that the world had shrunk because I could clearly see the curvature of the Earth, indeed had to walk carefully to avoid falling over because of it. Naturally, it was raining, and the clouds ahead were so full and dark it felt like early evening. The walls of the tunnel were punctuated at intervals by doors which periodically opened, releasing the sound of people eating and drinking in noodle bars. The sounds turned into little rabid noise creatures, which scuttled down the tunnel like mechanical rats. Then the door would shut again, leaving me in a world where sound had never existed except in the form of the light green spattering sound of falling rain.
I managed to distinguish Mal’s building from the un-differentiated mass around me, and hobbled up an infinite number of stairs, each about six feet tall. I got lost on one of them for a while, and then came to realize I was standing outside the door to Rat-face’s apartment, and that it was open. This struck me as curious, and I went inside, though I knew that a confrontation with another human being was the last thing I needed. Luckily, the problem didn’t arise, because Rat-face and his buddy had been murdered. Their faces had been rendered nearly unrecognizable by the application of something like a steam iron, and their internal organs were failing to live up to the first part of their name. It occurred to me that I might have done this in the last ten minutes, but the blood was dried and the smell was pretty unpleasant, so I decided that on balance I probably hadn’t.
By the time I made it to Mal’s I was feeling really, really bad. The second rush is the heavy one, and it knits up with every other such rush like a string of Christmas cards on a line. The sound of dead people talking was so loud and dark that I could barely see where I was going. I made it to the middle of Mal’s floor, got out my spike and another foil package, and chased the first dose with a little more. The idea is to round off the edges of the really bad stuff by coating it with some first rush; but it seldom works very well and is the slipperiest of all possible slopes. I slumped there for a while, surrounded by visions of blood and shit, then I checked out for a while.
When I heard someone at the door my eyes opened immediately, and it was only then I realized they’d been open all the time. I’d been very far away, inside somewhere distant and small and old, and my eyeballs were crispy from not blinking.
The door opened. A figure stood silhouetted against the dim light in the corridor. It took me a while to work out who it was. I wasn’t especially pleased.
“How the hell did you find me?” I slurred, my tongue clacking in my mouth like a stick against iron railings.
“Guys at the back entrance called Howie.” Vinaldi grinned. “Said, and I quote, ‘The big fucked-up guy is on the loose again.’ Howie reckoned this was the only place you could be, and he was right. Seen the mess downstairs?”
“It was Yhandim. I saw him with those guys a couple days ago.”
Vinaldi saw the opening, made the pitch. “He’s got the little girl and Nearly with him now.”
“I know,” I said. “This is not news to me.”
“Okay, well, you got to hurry. We let Ghuaji go, after Dath planted a tracker on him, and he’s just left New Richmond and is out in the Portal as we speak. An employee of mine has seen him get in a car, and he’s heading out into the wilds. He’s going home.” Vinaldi held a hand down to me. I didn’t take it.
“I’m still not going,” I said.
His voice was calm. “Yes, you are, Randall, and you know it. There’s a truck outside and I can see that I’m going to have to drive myself, which will be a first in about ten years, so get the fuck up and let’s get after him.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said, trying to climb to my feet. I still had no intention of going. I just wanted to give him a hard time on his own level. The walls moved alarmingly, and I almost didn’t go through with it. But once I was standing, going back down again seemed even harder. “Why don’t you sit tight in your fortress on one-eighty-five and let your men handle it? That’s what you pay them for. I tried to take you down, remember? Why are you hanging round giving me grief?”
“Atonement, Randall. You ever hear of the word?”
“Of course I’ve heard of it, and what does it have to do with you? You said yourself it’s their own stupid fault they got left in The Gap. Even if it wasn’t, everybody did bad things in there and it’s far too late to do anything about it now. You want to atone for something, atone for the drugs you sell that people like Shelley Latoya OD on, atone for the guys you’ve had whacked, and just leave me alone.”
By the time I finished I was shouting wildly. Vinaldi left a pause, and then spoke quietly and with finality.
“Come on, Jack,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”
I jerked my head to look up at him. Maybe it was the use of my first name, which appeared unconscious and unplanned, but what I saw in front of me was not Johnny Vinaldi, the gang lord and vicious thug who had half of New Richmond’s underworld in the palm of his hand. Instead, I saw just a man who was having to gear himself up to something he didn’t want to do. Something he was afraid of, possibly more so even than me. Someone who, for reasons of his own, was giving me an opportunity to be less of a waste of everybody’s time and patience.