That humans are not her species is a conclusion she has come to only this afternoon. It’s a little disappointing, since she’s only felt like a human being for a couple of days, and she has every intention of keeping it to herself, especially if the question of her human status becomes a matter of learned dispute. But it’s the only way she can explain to herself how little she minds killing them.
Even given that they’ll come back – minds out of slow-running computer storage, bodies out of vats – being killed must cause them a lot of distress and inconvenience. (This is different from the dead, Scientist pedantically reminds her – different storage, different retrieval, different problem. Yeah, yeah, she tells it, and as that self is off-lined again Dee has a fleeting thought about Annette, the woman whose genotype she now knows she shares. She thinks of her among the dead, she thinks about codes and stores, and for another moment Sys flashes up some tenuous connection, but it’s gone…She’s just got too much on her mind right now.)
The distress and inconvenience caused is, for Ax, the whole point. He’s taking great delight in knocking off anyone who ever ripped him off, exploited him financially or spiritually or sexually. He chortles as they fall, to Dee’s bullets or his. Three so far, and more to go. Dee just doesn’t give a shit, basically. She knows she’s capable of emotion, of empathy, even of ethics – they’re right there, burned into the circuits of most of her selves – but they don’t seem to apply to people like Parris, or that woman Ax skewered in a cellar two hours ago, or the man she shot in a doorway. Perhaps they’re only meant to apply to one’s own species, in which case they’re not her species.
It now occurs to her, as she squints into the sun and watches out for bounty-hunters, for signs of hue-and-cry, that there is another explanation. Perhaps she’s human, all right, and her victims are not. Perhaps what they all have in common is a parasitic mimicry of humanity, which she can see through. One of her Story threads, which she plays on nights when she wants to give herself stronger fare than her usual historical romance, is about vampires. She wonders if the ostensibly human species – or hominid genera – are divided between real people and some hollow mockery of people, beings like vampires, who live on the lives of others. Killing them might be quite different from killing real people, who only live on the lives of plants and animals and machines.
An interesting thought.
She hears Ax’s long, lung-emptying sigh. She braces her back for the expected thud of the pistol and thump of the recoil. They shake her body a second later.
‘Got him!’ says Ax.
Dee doesn’t need to look around. The exit-ramp their eyrie overlooks is five metres down and about twenty metres away, and she can picture the sprawled body of the banker lying there. She can also picture the faces and lenses turning in their direction in the next couple of seconds…
But they’ve already rolled, Ax and Dee, down the slope of the hollow and out of immediate sight. A metre-wide hole in the synthetic rock leads to a curving chute, which they patiently climbed up about half an hour ago. The glassy smoothness which made the ascent difficult makes the descent easy. Dee goes first, feet-first, wrapped in her cloak. The drop at the end is awkward; her lumbar ligaments strain, her heels jar – another task for the Surgeon sub-routines. She turns and holds up her hands and catches Ax as he hurtles out.
The corridor they’re standing in has the usual quasi-organic rounded-off corners in its rectangular cross-section, and curves smoothly around to the left and right. The glowing mother-of-pearl surfaces are pocked with holes, studded with chitinous lenses and membranes – and, hacked crudely in, mikes and cameras, office windows and doors. Already alarms are echoing along the corridor, and rippling along the wires. Soldier and Spy, time-sharing Dee’s senses and transmitters, hack and ping. Some of the alarm-signals are disrupted.
But not all. With a silent conference of glances, Dee and Ax turn and race to the left. They head for the lift which they used to ascend from street-level. Doors open down the corridor in front of them, alarms shrill again. A security guard in a black uniform steps out and raises a hand. He’s just in sight around the curve of the corridor. Dee skids to a stop and catches Ax’s arm.
‘Back!’ she gasps.
They turn and run back. The guard’s footsteps echo behind them. Dee notices, out of the corner of her eye, a movement behind a thin area of the wall – not a window, but internal to the building. She runs on for a few metres and then stops and turns. The guard is just coming into view. She aims carefully at the thin patch and shoots at it. It shatters like glass and a blue, bubbling liquid floods out, slicking the floor. The guard slips on it and tumbles, then jumps up and begins tearing off his uniform and yelling for help. Dee can sense a barrier up ahead, thick and resilient – perhaps a cordon of guards; she can’t be sure at this distance.
Close by there’s an elliptical hole in the wall. Somebody has scrawled above it ‘FIRE EXIT?!’ Dee looks at it, looks at Ax, raises her eyebrows. Ax nods.
Dee peers in. It’s a dark chute, sloping sharply down and turning out of sight. She steps in, lies down on her cloak, and lets go of the top edge of the hole.
She instantly finds herself plunged downwards and whirled around what feels like an almost vertical spiral drop. ‘AAAAAHHHHH!’ she observes. Her scream is quite involuntary, but it comes too late to discourage Ax, who’s followed her a scant second later. His heels are perilously close to her hooded head. She hunches forward, only to see the drop as even more terrifying. Her ankles are crossed, her hands are clasping the cloak in front of her thighs. It’s all she can do not to curl up into a ball. The walls of the tube are in places transparent – at some moments she sees, or thinks she sees, over the city’s roofs, at others she glimpses the interiors of rooms, with the startled faces of their occupants looking straight back at her for fractions of a second. She can smell the fabric of the cloak beginning to scorch.
Her other senses are utterly confused. She retreats to the detached perspective of Sys, which is already running the first steps of the bale-out routine, getting ready for somatic systems failure. Dee has a brief, chilling image of her computer detaching itself from the remains of her animal brain and crawling out of the bloody wreckage of her skull.
Then she’s sliding along more slowly, in an open space. Light shines on her closed eyelids. She opens them and finds herself still whizzing along, but decelerating…she braces her shoulders and, right on Newtonian cue, Ax’s heels cannon into them. Daylight and open air, and people yelling.
Dee sprawls and stops. Everything is still spinning. She sits up and looks around. Ax is a few metres away, eyes still shut, mouth open. They’re at the bottom of a gentle slope of black, vitrified material at the foot of the tower, in a plaza. Among benches and fountains and the entrances to other buildings, people are staring at her.
Just to the right of her right hand, a centimetre-wide hole appears in the black glass. Cracks radiate out from it. At the same time, she hears a soft pock.
Another hole, closer.
‘She-it!’
Dee leaps up, staggers forward and grabs Ax by the ankle and drags him across the lip of the slope. He falls half a metre with a bump. He cries out and opens his eyes. Dee looks up the face of the tower, sees dark figures darting on balconies high above. She fires a couple of shots upwards, on general principle, then hauls Ax to his feet.
‘Run!’
They’re both still so dizzy that dodging and weaving, and falling and rolling, come quite naturally. Within a second or two they’re among the now screaming pedestrians in the plaza, though not yet out of the cone of fire from the tower-top.