The ceaseless crunch of the crawler’s treads across the ice and grit took hold of Thierrin’s nerves in two hands and shook them. Already he was on edge. Insertions like this always got to him, made him uneasy. Even with air-filtration augs and supplemental oxygen it was labor just to breathe out here, let alone go crawling through ruins or tunnels or whatever other fit-to-die-in hole Seven Star Solutions decided he needed to plumb.
At least this time he wouldn’t be upside-down and ass-backwards in a glorified ditch alone. There were pluses and minuses to collaboration, to be sure; more people working the find meant splitting things more ways and there were more noisy feet to alert whatever bizarre sentries might be down there and more shaky hands to set off any number of traps. The flip side was that if things went bust he wouldn’t have to outrun a pursuer, just his companions.
He propped the brim of his hat up on his fingertips just a little, oculars whirring faintly as he glanced surreptitiously at the two of them. There was a girl, slightly built, all her augments crammed into her face and hands, huffing at the canned oxygen like her life depended on it — which, of course, it did. Thierrin had heard of her before — she went by Sextant, whatever that name was supposed to mean — and she was allegedly the best codebreaker in the game. At least, that’s what the suits at Triple S told him. Thierrin had some high-quality new eyes but hers were absolutely top-shelf shit. Just by the look of the three of them she was probably kitted to scope thermal signatures, electric currents, infrared, ultraviolet, you name it, and on top of that almost certainly there were more zeros on her magnification than he could even dream about. She was idly toying with a small metal sphere, rolling it along the backs of her flawless augmented digits, then flipping it around to the front, tossing it up, catching it on the back of her hand, rolling it from wrist to fingertips, over and over. It was almost hypnotic.
Then there was Gorhus. Thierrin wasn’t short: why be short if you could afford to be tall? But Gorhus made him look like a child, and the man covered almost as much horizontal distance across the shoulders as he did vertical distance from head to toe. If the codebreaker couldn’t manage to get them in somewhere with tact, Thierrin suspected Gorhus could manage with muscle. Strapped to his broad back were a baffling array of guns, grenades, and other implements. His trunk-thick arms rippled with synthetic muscles over which his bronzed skin was stretched taut in a way that looked almost painful to Thierrin, and his hands bore the hallmarks of powerful embedded switchable electromagnets, enabling him to have a perfect grip, to command metal objects to his palm at a distance, or to pull metal fixtures off their hinges. Thierrin was certain Gorhus wouldn’t even stand a chance at fitting into many of the places he had infiltrated in the past. He could only hope their current target would be a bit less cramped. Gorhus sat, unmoving, silent, slablike at the far end of the crawler bed, sucking in blasé lungfuls of the toxic air.
Sextant must have noticed Thierrin’s gaze, because she piped up, “What are you looking at, spare parts?”
Thierrin allowed a bare hint of a grin to cross his face in between hits of the O2. “I thought it might be a good idea to get a read on who I’m meant to be working with,” he said.
“Yeah? How about who the fuck are we working with?” Sextant shook her head agitatedly, her acid-green locks bouncing to and fro, as she gestured with a frantic hand to indicate herself and Gorhus. “Some two-bit ruins crawler. Some Seven Star dog on a leash, yeah?”
“Something like that,” Thierrin said. It wasn’t ideal that he had gotten under her skin so quickly, but her tone indicated that she was prepared to underestimate him. Always a position he liked to be in.
“Something like that, great. Pair of lead boots.” She softened a little, though whether out of genuine relief or resignation, Thierrin couldn’t say. She leaned back against the side of the crawler and resumed fiddling with her sphere. “Where are we going, anyway? Suits never let anyone see a map. Obviously.”
“Not sure,” Thierrin said, “but I have my suspicions.”
His statement hung in the foul air between them. Sextant looked at him with an eyebrow raised. Thierrin began adjusting the regulator on the tank of O2 at his side.
“Are you going to elaborate on that at all?” Sextant asked, clearly irritated.
“You sure seem eager to hear the leashed dog bark.”
“Jackass.”
“Look at that, I’m practically a whole menagerie now. Anyway, it’s probably an old research outpost,” Thierrin said. “Instructions were to find any information, chips, old drives, anything that might have anything valuable on it.”
“All three of us for an old research outpost? Seems like overkill.”
Which, of course, it was. The job was a simple scour and split, that part was true. Since there wasn’t any mention of potential termination in the contract, something for which Thierrin, like any self-respecting mercenary, charged an awful lot extra, it wasn’t a grab at an outpost or something like that. But there was no way a derelict research station would necessitate these three crack hires. Thierrin could only think of two possibilities that would: either ex-military installation or weapons lab.
“Someplace where Triple S expects us to have difficulty getting in, clearly,” Thierrin said. “Someplace with guns in it, I imagine.”
“I could have told you that,” Sextant said with a roll of her oculars. Thierrin swallowed the obvious question: well then, why’d you ask?
“You alive over there?” he called out to Gorhus.
The mountain of a man didn’t so much as budge.
It took about five hours — five awkward, painstaking hours, tendons and bones jostled by the uneven motion of the crawler, lungs protesting from the air, if you could even call it that, five hours of chapped skin and frayed nerves — to reach the insertion point.
“Gonna be a tight squeeze,” Thierrin said with a slight sigh.
The entrance, such as it was, was situated in a loose outcrop of rubble, almost directly down into the ground. A gap between two hunks of icy stone scarcely large enough for him to inch through led downward into impenetrable darkness. The passage would necessitate hands and knees. He looked over his shoulder over Sextant’s head to Gorhus behind her, nearly twice her height, and looked back down into the collapsed shaft. Then back to Gorhus. The man had a visor down over his eyes and his bald head glimmered in the headlights of the crawler. He seemed oblivious to his surroundings. Serene. Like it wasn’t colder than an aug surgeon’s hands out here, like the air wasn’t actively trying to kill them, like their guts weren’t all issuing noisy protests against the radiation meds.
“Well, all right then, I just thought I would give you fair warning,” Thierrin said.
Sextant stepped past him and flicked her small metal ball down into the hole. Tink, tink, tink… it rang out as it collided off unseen surfaces. Then it was silent. She stood over the entrance expectantly.
“Seems li — “ Thierrin began, but Sextant held up a hand to silence him.
Tink, came the sound, faintly, distantly.
“Bit of a drop,” Thierrin said, shaking his head.
“I can see it,” Sextant said, her central eye dilating. “It’s wedged in a crevice. They really caved in the shit out of this thing, didn’t they?”
“Whoever they are,” Thierrin said. “Crevice means footholds; places to lodge a cam, to rappel maybe.”
“Cam’ll crack this, I think,” Sextant said. “The substrate is too brittle. Too much weathering from the ice. Maybe also seismic damage from the nuclear shell that popped off south of here, way back when.”
“So we try to secure a peg up here and only run one safety?”
“Nowhere else to do it.”
At this Gorhus shifted. For a man of his mass he moved with a remarkable speed, drawing a mighty piton from his pack and wedging it into a crevice in the rock beneath them. Thierrin heard a low hum from the man’s hands as he activated his electromagnets, repelling the piton into the crack and wedging it there firmly. Gorhus grabbed hold of the end of the piton and tested its strength by attempting to move it back and forth; even with his augmented musculature straining at it, the piton did not budge. He pulled a glittering carabiner and steel rope out of his pack as well, tightly fastening them to the eyelet on the end of the peg.
“Who needs a climbing hammer anyhow?” Thierrin said with a grin. “I sure hope we all have cable gloves. Are we drawing lots to see who’s first?”
“I’m first, obviously,” Sextant said, brushing her hair aside and stuffing her slender fingers into the thick gloves that would keep the cable from slicing her hands open as it slid past them.
“Why obviously?”
“For one, I have a metered readout of the relative position of the ball to my own. As well as a video feed from it. Plus, and this might be out of bounds, but I bet my eyes are the best of ours. I’m also not sure that certain people,” she jerked her thumb towards Gorhus here, “are going to make it through the entrance without it all collapsing.”
“So you want to assure your frosty grave, is that it?”
“I can’t afford to come back empty-handed from this one, so it doesn’t make a ton of practical difference to me.”
The logic of the desperate, Thierrin thought, is as unassailable as it comes.
It was Sextant, then Gorhus, then Thierrin last. He supposed he was glad to bring up the rear after thoughts of the shaft collapsing were inconveniently placed in his head. If it were going to happen it would likely be when Gorhus tried to fit through. But fit through he did — whatever musculature he had rebuilt to his specifications must have been elastic enough to press and deform to get him through the tight spaces without incident. The shaft itself was pitted and old, with little promontories and outcroppings along its walls. Every so often, Thierrin could have sworn he saw writing on the stone, but every time he took a closer look it was weathered pits where ice had insinuated itself and expanded and contracted over who knows how long to form little divots and rivulets, etched by no design but whichever grand one might exist. A blessing was that the air seemed somewhat fresher down here. Thierrin, always one to second-guess a gift, wondered to himself. Shouldn’t the toxins be heavier than air? Sink down the shaft and concentrate from the bottom up? But the rigors of the task at hand put the questions out of his mind.
About halfway down by Sextant’s reckoning and without any warning one of the stones gave way under Thierrin’s feet. “Heads up!” he called down, and he leaned his head back over his shoulder on the rope.There was a dull thunk as the stone landed square on the top of Gorhus’s bald head. After the collision, the stone bounced off with a miraculous apex nearly at the soles of Thierrin’s feet. In an instant Gorhus’s hand shot up and grasped the the rock from midair.
“Heads up for what?” Sextant called back exasperatedly around the regulator gripped between her teeth.
“Heads up for nothing. Gorhus took care of it,” replied Thierrin down the shaft. “How much further is it?”
“I already told you, halfway. What was it?”
“I… a stone became knocked loose.”
“A stone be — a stone became knocked loose?” Sextant’s laughs echoed up the chamber. “Certainly it couldn’t be the great Leashed Dog’s fault! It was all the plot of that damn stone! To have become knocked loose in such a fashion!”
“Shut the fuck up, shallow sockets,” Thierrin said, tucking the words under his breath, but Sextant laughed even harder.
“Shallow sockets, wow,” she cackled. “This from the rock jockey.”
Thierrin was suddenly aware of just how slender the steel line from which they all dangled truly was. He entertained a brief thought of pulling out his hotknife and just clipping off Sextant and Gorhus, letting the two of them tumble down to their inevitable deaths. He knew he didn’t even need the line to get down and back out, not really, not with the suspensors in his wrists and ankles. It would be too easy to do. But he had to admit, grudgingly, that they might still come in handy.
They continued down the rappel for a time, until finally Sextant said, “I picked up the ball a while back, and we’re almost to the floor of this thing. There’s a door down here for whatever that’s worth.”
“What kind of door?” Thierrin asked.
“Big steel one, square. Got a lot of writing on it. I can’t even read it. Must be some other language.”
Thierrin froze for a moment. It was starting to make sense in his head why he in particular got tacked on to what should have been a classic brains-brawn outfit. “Don’t touch that door,” he said.
“Yeah, no shit. I don’t go around touching things willy-nilly. Unlike you and loose stones!” She began to giggle again. The sound set Thierrin on edge even more than the rattling of the crawler had.
Eventually Thierrin slipped off the bottom of the cable and onto the solid rock floor beneath them. The steel thread pooled up on the ground like the entrails of a snake. As he dusted himself off and stowed his cable gloves he saw both of the others staring at the gleaming metal door. Gorhus’s visor shed a pale green light upon it, casting it in a hue typically reserved for the faces of people suffering from gastrointestinal distress. True to Sextant’s word, the door was carved all over with indecipherable script.
“So what we have here is a rogue thaumaturge’s workshop,” Thierrin said.
“You’re kidding me,” Sextant said. “What, some freak of nature just bopped off into the wastes alone and built a…. what. A wizard’s lab out here?”
“No doubt about it,” said Thierrin.
“To what end?”
Thierrin shrugged. “Lone wolf type, I guess. Tired of all the looks askance. Wanted to practice in peace maybe. Or maybe trying to figure out some really weird shit.”
“You sure know a lot about this stuff.”
It was time to ever-so-slightly tip his hand. “Well, it is my job.”
“Oh hell. You’re a thaumaturge?”
“No,” said Thierrin.
“Just no?”
“No, and these are harmless.” He gestured at the markings on the door. “They’re just keeping the thing locked.”
“No way to pick it, though. So we need to go in the hard way.”
Thierrin looked over as Gorhus dusted off his hands. They were bigger than dinner plates.
“Stand back,” Gorhus said, in a voice so low Thierrin had to convince himself he heard it at all. He was happy to oblige, and by the speed with which she retreated, so was Sextant. Gorhus stretched out his hands and there was a low hum as the electromagnets began to power on. At first, Thierrin wasn’t sure there was enough power to budge the thing, but then the door began to buckle, bowing outward in the middle at Gorhus’s hand-height like an open book. Then there was a colossal wrenching noise and the entire door was pulled from its frame, colliding with Gorhus’s outstretched hands. It looked like a kid catching a yo-yo.
There was a rush of air from inside the open chamber, blowing out at first with the force of a gale, and Thierrin and Sextant had to brace themselves to avoid being flung back. Eventually the pressures equalized, and Thierrin realized that his air-filter augs weren’t whining at him any longer. He whistled. “That’s a sophisticated air purifier all the way down here. Whoever left this place knew their stuff.”
Sextant popped her regulator out of her mouth. “Refreshing,” she said.
“All right, let’s see what we have here.” Thierrin stepped past Gorhus with Sextant hot at his heels. As he entered the chamber, five lights on either side of it flicked on in series, revealing the room even more clearly than his oculars. He heard a massive clang as Gorhus set the door propped against the cavern wall, and began to look around. Benches and desks lined every wall, all of them strewn with papers and old terminals. “Spread out, check these machines,” he said. “They’re old, archaic even, but they probably have removable drives the drones at Triple S can crack.”
“Who died and elected you our leader?” Sextant grouched, but she complied, as did Gorhus. The three of them split up, rifling through papers, checking all of the terminals.
It became clear to Thierrin quite quickly that this thaumaturge was highly interested in biological and anatomical processes. Dozens of painstaking drawings of anatomy studies were hand-drawn throughout the work — in margins, in between paragraphs, on their own sheets of paper. Thierrin had tracked down and ended dozens of thaumics, but none quite so studious, so thorough with their documentation. Unfortunately, the writing was gibberish. Whoever the thaumaturge was, they had written everything in a cipher. “Sextant, what are the odds of you cracking this code in a reasonable timeframe?” he asked.
“Pretty good,” she said. “I’ve already started running it for typical shift and substitution ciphers. No dice there, but I mean, this is all handwritten. It can’t be too complex.”
Thierrin sighed under his breath. He knew it absolutely could. “Okay, let me know if you get anything.”
“Thierrin,” Gorhus said, suddenly at his side. “Every drive and chip has been removed from these machines. There’s nothing here.”
Thierrin turned this over in his mind. These types of glyphies were all the same. There was no way whoever this thaumic was would leave the lab in pristine condition, besides the computers, and with all these notes, but not leave some clue, something they could use to figure it all out. They all wanted to be discovered, wanted the world to know how brilliant they were, but they were going to make you work for —
“Hold up, I found something,” Sextant said. “Electric line running into the wall here. Keeps going.” She pointed at a bare section of wall.
Ah-ha, thought Thierrin. They were both useful after all.
The three of them gathered around the back wall of the chamber. “It’s totally featureless, apart from that cable,” said Sextant, all three of her oculars dilating. “Uncannily smooth in fact.”
“What’s it made out of?” Thierrin asked. “Maybe we could have Big G pull it away?”
Sextant’s middle ocular dilated further. “Titanium,” she said.
“Well, fuck,” Thierrin said. “The whole thing? You’re kidding.”
“Wish I were, champ,” she said. “But I have an idea.” Her oculars flicked back and forth, then followed a trail along the wall. She traced it with her finger. “The line runs through the wall but it starts in this room. Here we go.” She reached another section of wall that seemed featureless to Thierrin. Suddenly, her right pointer finger bifurcated and a hair-thin prybar extended from it. She slid it along the wall until it hitched against something, then pushed, until a vertical seam appeared. She pried it open to reveal a tiny hatch with a small green button behind it, which she pressed.
There was no grinding of machinery or indication of the age of the facility whatsoever as the titanium wall sunk smoothly into the floor.
“Nice job,” Thierrin said. Sextant just shrugged.
Behind the wall was another, smaller chamber, this one round. Situated around the edges of the room were five gaping chutes which led to depths unknown, although all but one possessed a closed glass hatch. Adjacent to each chute was a table with a workstation and glass tubes that ran from the floor to the ceiling, the interiors of which were crusted with a dried rust-colored substance. The center of the room was dominated by a metal pod with a glass front, lit in a garish pink light, and inside the pod was the dessicated husk of a person, with long white hair and wrinkled, spindly fingers and stretched-tight skin.
“I think we can check off the ‘really weird shit’ column,” said Sextant as she approached the pod. “I’ll investigate this if the two of you want to look around.”
Thierrin immediately looped around to check the terminals in back. Still-functional drives were connected to them, which he unhooked and tossed to Gorhus.
“There’s an inscription here,” Sextant said. “It says in all caps, GENOVRAEIS THE LORD OF LIFE AND DEATH.”
“You gotta be joking, it doesn’t say that,” Thierrin said, rolling his eyes.
“Swear on my wife’s grave,” Sextant said somberly. “Oh, shit. There’s some etchings underneath.” Thierrin heard her blow a short, sharp breath, presumably to clear dust from the pod. “It’s a translation of this phrase in the cipher!”
“Fuck yeah,” Thierrin said.
“I should have this cracked in three minutes and then let’s scram.”
Suddenly, from the corner of his eye, Thierrin saw the biggest prize in the room. Jutting from a low port on the rear of the pod was a tiny, iridescent green chip. He knew he had to grab that chip without letting either Sextant or Gorhus see him.
“Okay, I can start reading some of these test logs now,” Sextant said as she paced back and forth.
“Hit us,” Thierrin said, pleased that her attention, at least, would be divided.
“Okay, so it’s obvious this fucker was interested in anatomy and physiology. It turns out that she was trying to crack the code of replication.”
Thierrin’s shoulder slumped. “We can already replace every part of the body.”
“No, this is different,” Sextant said. “She developed some sort of biological process to create an entirely new body and then… this sounds so fucking stupid.”
“Just read it,” Thierrin said as he inched towards the chip. “She’ll be dramatic, but I doubt she’s inflating her findings.”
“Says she found a way to transfer her consciousness into the new body. The fluid that comes down the pipes molds to your genetic sequence and creates a genetic copy of you, and you can transfer your thoughts and experiences into the new brain and live on.”
Thierrin looked around at Gorhus, who was fiddling with the drive on the back of one of the terminals. Both the computer and its data storage looked tiny, toylike, in Gorhus’s massive palms.
Now was the time. He inched forward and brushed against the pod with his left side, snaking his arm down, removing the chip, and palming it, tucking every last secret this place held in his hand. Maybe financial security for the rest of his life, if he didn’t need to split it three ways. He looked up. Neither of the others had noticed. Only two jobs left to do.
“Sextant, I’m getting antsy. Will you double check something for me?” Thierrin asked, interrupting her.
The exasperation in her voice was evident. “What, rock jockey?”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Will you go test the door from the other side so we can make sure if it closes we can get out of here? Just go shut the fucking thing and then I’ll try to open it from this side.” He glanced at the button on the wall in this chamber, identical to the one in the first room.
“Why don’t you do it?” she said.
“If it needs a juice-up or if the hatch closed or something is why. Will you just do it?”
“Fine,” she said with a grunt. She stepped out of the pod room. Thierrin heard the whir of her prybar extending from her finger. He knew he had just a few seconds to make this happen. He flicked on his hotknife. Glyphs flared along the blade and handle and there was a hiss of air. Thierrin didn’t know exactly how it worked — he lifted it off one of his thaumic marks a while back — but it turned the very air adjacent to its blade into superheated plasma. Just a very thin current of it — enough to cut through just about anything, but not enough to cook his hand with convection.
Gorhus was standing facing one of the terminals adjacent to the open chute, having just stood up from looking under the workstation upon which it was situated. The door slid silently closed. Thierrin leapt. He activated the spring-loaded augments in his knees and hips and closed the gap to Gorhus in an instant, wrapping his arms around the giant’s shoulders and driving the hotknife into the neck just below the ear.
There was a wretched hissing. Thierrin was always hoping, at least a little, that sometime he did this, it would smell like meat on a spit. Something normal, natural. He was always let down. The skin, the sinew, the blood vessels, everything was synthetic, and the smell of burnt rubber was nauseating. Gorhus flailed his arms with a violence and tried to crush Thierrin against the wall, but Thierrin drew the hotknife all the way across the neck to the other ear. The synth-skin was cauterized neatly and instantly by the plasma, but Gorhus had fluid-pipes of metal, and Thierrin didn’t know what else, and as he thrashed they wept jets of foul liquid in an arc in front of them. Thierrin let go of Gorhus’s shoulders and on his descent drove the knife into the man’s back, leaving a glowing, gaping seam of flesh behind, the augmented muscles twitching bizarrely underneath. Gorhus wheeled around, clutching at his throat, and Thierrin ducked under one of his mighty fists, his hair caught in the turbulence of the blow, before driving the knife deep into the giant’s eye socket. Gorhus tumbled backwards to the floor with a thud, twitching and jerking. Thierrin had to be sure; he stood over the man and drove the knife into his eyes and face again and again, the hissing and steaming and leaking almost enough to drive him mad. Eventually the man was still.
He pressed his ear to the wall. “Hey, dipshit, can you open it or not?” Sextant called from the other room, barely audible above his heaving, exerted breaths.
“N — No dice,” he gasped out. “You’ll have to — do it on your end.”
“Whatever,” she said, and the wall slid down. Thierrin was ready. He leapt again, hotknife singing through the air, Sextant’s eyes dilating widely and her mouth a perfect O. He prepared to bring the blade down directly into her middle eye
when all at once
there was a low hum
and the knife was wrenched from his grasp
and it hissed hideously as it whizzed past his ear
and it took the ear with it and that smell — his ears were all natural
and he collided with Sextant and they both tumbled to the ground. Thierrin looked behind him, clutching the side of his head, the burnt and glossy ring of skin where his ear had been instantly plasma-cauterized and his pain suppressors already coursing through his veins. Gorhus had somehow still been alive, still had enough strength to activate his electromagnets and pull his knife away. It was embedded in the man’s hand, hissing and stinking. His last ounce of effort gone, Gorhus’s eyes glazed over, and he lolled to one side, motionless.
“What the fuck!” Sextant shrieked, trying to clamber from underneath Thierrin. She nearly broke free from his grasp into the pod-chamber, but Thierrin seized her ankle and brought her unceremoniously back down to the floor. “What the fuck! What are you doing, you fucking freak!”
Thierrin squeezed, and he felt the muscles in his grip hyper-activate, snapping Sextant’s ankle. She screamed, blood-curdling, piercing. It was a shame; Thierrin sort of liked her. Sort of thought she was beautiful in her own gritty, abrasive way.
Suddenly Sextant’s foot detached from her body.
It wriggled and kicked, its nerve endings still firing, as she stood up and began to limp away from him. His vision clouded. He had not been so angry in a long time. He stood up and tore after her and it was just as he was about to reach her, right as she came level with the rose-pink pod full of the skeleton corpse of the mad mage who started them all on this path who knows how many years ago, that she turned and fired the dart gun. Pfft pfft pfft, three of them. The first and second missed, but the third barely grazed his shoulder. He clicked his tongue against his teeth condescendingly. “Looks like you need to practice your ai —“
His jaw locked.
Fuck.
The paralytic, even the tiny dose from the scrape, acted fast. The paralysis descended rapidly down his body, locking each muscle in place. He teetered, his eyes wide.
Sextant bent down, pulled the hotknife from Gorhus’s limp hand, and with her jet-black oculars tracing the electrical impulses of Thierrin's body, drove it directly into his heart. Then, with a push so slight it was almost gentle, she shoved him backwards.
He fell into the open chute and down and down and down, the fresh air whistling past him, and then he hit the ground and everything went white.
Thierrin stood up, clutching his chest. The hotknife had missed his vital organs. He pulled it from his chest and flicked it off. The girl wasn’t a killer. He looked around. The way he survived the fall was evident — there was a pool of that same rust-colored substance here at the bottom of the chute. The smell was that of fresh meat, of blood, of bone marrow.
I’m going to get out of here, he thought to himself. I have my suspensors. Piece of cake. That bitch won’t know what hit her. He flipped them on and immediately felt himself lighten.
There was a soft sucking sound. He looked down. The rusty liquid which clung to his body was divesting itself from him of its own accord.
It crept down into the primordial pool surrounding him. Some curiosity or compulsion drove him to remain, rather than flee.
A shape began to rise from the pool. At first malleable and elastic it rapidly coalesced into identifiable minutiae, with the same squelching sound, ever louder; bones, then the ligaments and cartilage in the joints, then the musculature, the tendons, then the skin, blood red and glistening in the pale pink light filtering from above. The orbs of the eyes rolled forward into their sockets. The being was nude, the flesh shifting from red to the tone of Thierrin’s skin as the substance began to dry. Thierrin leaned over and vomited, again and again, into the pool, stomach heaving, all the adrenaline wearing away and his own mortality laid so bare before him, constructed in real time from fluid and grime. He wiped his mouth, looked up.
There he stood before himself.
What are you?
surely you know
Well, yes. You’re me.
the me you neverwere the you that you everdreamed
My ass would never talk so cryptically.
you could never be me now and i never you so how could you know how could you know what your ass might do unchromed and unplasticked rebirthed in the glory of flesh how could you begin to imagine
I guess that’s true. I guess I have fundamentally altered myself.
in all ways everyone does everyone does each day they wake and choose to be
You mean the ways I act. The choices I make.
you set the clockwork ticking and you think you are driven by it each day you believe you made a choice to awaken and you made a thousand choices before you chose to fall asleep but the machine was built around you and you were meant to live inside it
The machine is bigger than me. The systems were in place before I was ever born.
you built it yourself
I built the bandcities? I built Triple S? I built being flat broke through no fault of my own, having to claw my way up?
if not you then who else
The untold thousands who came before me is who else.
they perhaps believed as you did too that they were guided upon the track of the cosmos and agencygiven by their birthright and birthmind and twisting all of their flesh and as you know if you consider you are the sameall the same and by your designs with your own two hands you build the machine that punishes you
It can’t all be my fault.
if not you then who else
We’re going in circles.
we are indeed and it is when we realize that that we will open our eyes and awaken for good
I just pinched myself. I think I’m awake.
if we were we would not dreamme and unthink you and the self you are is the self i would be and you think many things but what do you know
So you’re saying there’s something I’m missing.
of course and the blind would see it plainer than we do
Well, thinking back. If not me then who. Suppose it is my fault. How could I have done it any differently?
you could try again without the engineering
Try again?
wake up and allow yourself to be rebirthed and believe in a new you and me for all and forever
I can do it all over? I can do it without the augs, without the killing, without everything that landed me here? I could do it all like you?
we can the you that is notyou and the me that not isyou
Then this is the end of me and the beginning of you.
no it is the beginning of us
I have never thought about us before. Us.
it is time and we can feel we are ready
We are ready
We are ready to awaken and open our eyes forever
May we ever be the architects of something beyond ourselves
may we know something lovelier
It was a long, long time later before Seven Star Solutions sent the cleanup team in. They had pulled everything off the drives Sextant spirited out of the facility and she alone collected the reward.
The team of cleaners had themselves rappelled down the chute, head to toe in envirosuits. With high pressure water they hosed down the chutes and collected all the biomaterial. It was all so old, even at the bottom of each chute, that it had dried into a hard, unforgiving crust.
One of them noticed Thierrin's body, lying prostrate on the floor, neck bent at an unnatural angle against the wide, dried puck of red substrate beneath it.
"Chief, I think you should see this. Maybe get a medic."
"No need. Sucker's dead. This is one of the saps that got sent out in the first place." The chief leaned over, hooked a finger under Thierrin's chin, and lifted it slightly, gesturing to the hotknife protruding from his chest. "This knife got him right in the heart, look at it. Probably died even before he broke his neck when he hit the ground here. Get the rest of this hosed down, I'll get someone over to haul the corpse."
The first cleaner turned on her jet and began to wash away the red gunk from around Thierrin's body.
A tiny iridescent green glint in his palm caught her eye.