A Quantum Mythology (28 page)

Vic crept into the kitchen, bedside lamp at the ready. There was a young human male, perhaps twelve or so years old, sitting at the breakfast bar. He was balancing a large and sharp-looking kitchen knife on its point and spinning it.

‘Who the fuck are you, and why the fuck are you in this house, which may actually be mine?’

The boy glanced up at him. Without the human-expression recognition-ware in his neunonics Vic couldn’t be entirely sure, but he thought the kid was looking at him as if he was an utter moron. He noticed a vial full of quicksilver-like liquid lying on the surface of the breakfast bar close to the knife.

‘It’s Elodie, Vic, you can put the lamp down.’

A bizarre set of expressions crossed Vic’s now-human face as he tried to mimic human confusion. Elodie just watched him.

‘Er …’ Vic started.

‘Why don’t you have a beverage of some kind and I’ll explain it to you?’

Vic went to the fridge and spent some time trying to open it. He pulled out a bottle of beer and waited for the smart cap to open. It didn’t.

‘Any idea how to open this?’ Vic asked.

The kid rolled his eyes. ‘Get me one, too,’ Elodie told him. Vic took another beer from the fridge and handed them both to Elodie. She opened both bottles by knocking the lids off against the edge of the breakfast bar.

‘So … ?’ Vic asked.

‘We’re on Suburbia,’ Elodie told him.

‘A
re we prisoners? Did they get Scab?’ Vic was unable to keep the hopeful tone out of his last question.

‘No. We snuck in as fragmented personalities hidden in the minds of two criminals who we shopped to a bounty crew—’

‘Who?’

‘Crabber— Does it matter?’

‘Is this Living City tech?’

‘What?’ Elodie was getting exasperated. ‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t we just bridge in?’

‘Because we’d have been torn apart by the internal security in a moment. Scab opened a pinpoint bridge and dropped some neunonics’ – Elodie tapped the vial – ‘and the most potent privacy swarm we could afford.’

‘Is that for me?’ Vic asked, pointing at the vial. Elodie nodded. Vic picked it up and held the vial to his head. The smart-matter vial transformed into a syringe, the needle grew through his skull with a crack and a rivulet of blood ran down Vic’s human face. ‘Ouch. That really fucking hurts.’

‘Hold still and stop being such a pussy.’

Vic was aware of, rather than actually feeling, the neunonics growing through the soft matter of his brain. Telemetry started to appear in his vision as his mind expanded and all sorts of information became available. Skills were hardwired into the grey matter that he hoped the meat of the body would be able to live up to.

‘Why am I here?’ Vic asked. ‘You’re the intrusion expert.’

‘Muscle.’

‘You want me to do violence in this body?’ he asked incredulously. It was so soft and brittle he was worried it would explode if he threw one solid punch.

‘I’ve found the Alchemist,’ Elodie told him, ignoring the question.

Elodie and Vic were lying under a tree looking across at a house. Vic was watching it carefully. Finally he saw it – a disturbance in the air that suggested a cloak. He nodded to Elodie and both of them backed away. It was only a matter of time before the cloaked S-sat would pick them up with passive scans, even at that range. They made their way back to Vic’s house.

‘How many, do you think?’ Vic asked.

‘I made three earlier,’ Elodie told him.

‘In these bodies, no weapons to speak of, we wouldn’t stand a chance.’ Elodie nodded in agreement. ‘So what’s the extraction plan?’

‘Basically, we didn’t know where the Alchemist was prior to getting in here, so we needed to locate him and then take him to an agreed-upon point at a certain time.’

‘How did you find him?’

‘I looked.’

‘So how are we going to get him out? The S-sats will just cut us down.’

‘What would Scab do?’ Elodie asked.

Vic considered this. ‘Something violent and grandiose.’

‘No, he’d think laterally,’ Elodie growled.

Vic was at a loss as to why she was irritated with him. ‘Okay, he’d do something violent and grandiose laterally.’

Vic arrived back at the house to find the odd curved plastic machine in a cradle was vibrating and making a ringing noise.

‘What is it?’ Vic asked.

‘Some sort of rudimentary communications device,’ Elodie hazarded a guess. ‘Pick it up.’ Vic did as Elodie suggested. There was a tinny noise coming from the device. ‘Hold it to your ear.’

Vic did so, though he was very much of the opinion that his antennas were vastly superior sensory organs. He listened to the voice on the end of the phone.

‘What would you like me to do about that?’ he eventually asked. He listened to the reply. ‘I see, and how would I do that?’ He listened again. ‘Okay, I’ll get right on it.’ He put the plastic device back down on its cradle. Elodie had an enquiring expression on her face. ‘It appears I have two human larvae, they are stranded at an institution called a “school” and I am required to retrieve them.’

Elodie nodded.

Conflict resolution worlds were easier, Vic thought, though they inspired similar genocidal thoughts. There was no assembler, and he had been expected to provide the larvae with nutrition that he somehow created himself. After muddling through that, he was expected to do the same for a male human mate. The male human appeared to think he was ‘acting strangely’, and kept pausing as if he was expecting to hear something after every time he said this.

The meal preparation, which was decreed by all to be a horrible failure, resulted in water leaking from Vic’s eyes out of pure frustration. Vic’s human mate fed the larvae something called ice cream, which appeared to cheer them up. Vic was then subjected to several hours of mind-numbing tedium that passed itself off as entertainment, in the form of odd two-dimensional media that were played on a large device attached to a dumb-matter wall. When Vic mentioned immersions, everyone looked at him oddly.

The worst came after the larvae retired to their rooms. Vic discovered that being a human female was great fun with a cucumber, but less fun with a human male. He then had to wait until his ‘mate’ was sound asleep before he could risk sneaking out.

Vic was still a bit shaky when he met up with Elodie.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Vic snapped.

‘Look, I’ve been pretending to be a human kitten for days now, don’t get me started.’

Elodie led them through the streets until she found what she was looking for – one of the automated ground cars on a driveway rather than its garage.

‘This car clearly belongs to some kind of radical free-thinker,’ Elodie muttered.

‘You can get us out of here, right? That’s why Scab recruited you, wasn’t it? Because you had a plan to get out of here if you were ever caught, right?’

Elodie looked up at Vic. She’d heard panic, but she was pretty sure Vic had got the accompanying facial expression wrong.

‘Why? Missing your nat girlfriend?’

‘She’s not my—’ Vic started.

‘Keep your fucking voice down!’ Elodie snapped.

Vic lapsed into silence. He wondered if explaining that practising with a cucumber had made him more responsive to her needs would impress Talia. He suspected he lacked the perspective to know for sure. He was coming to the conclusion that he just didn’t get human females, even if he was one at the moment.

‘And to answer your question – no,’ Elodie told him.

‘What?’

Elodie turned on him. ‘Do I have to cut your fucking tongue out?’ she hissed.

Vic looked down at the diminutive human larva standing in front of him, glaring at him angrily. He burst out laughing.

‘Oh, fuck you, Vic.’ Elodie turned and stalked away from him. She moved quickly up the driveway and knelt by one of the ground car’s doors. She hawked and spat on the lock mechanism.

‘Then seriously, what are we doing here? I can’t stay here – it’s like one of Scab’s torture immersions but without the fucking irony.’

Elodie was concentrating on the nanites in the spittle she was using as the medium for the hack to unlock the vehicle, then spoof it into not contacting the AI to tell it that the vehicle was active.

‘We’re testing a theory,’ a somewhat distracted Elodie told Vic.

‘A theory? A fucking theory! Do you know what he put in me?’ Vic hissed. Elodie glared at Vic. ‘What theory?’

The ground car’s door clicked open but the systems remained dark. Elodie climbed in and scooted to the passenger seat to make room for Vic.

‘Okay, so none of the inmates have neunonics. All the internal security, the control program, is soft-machine bioware. I mean, unless a house has been secured for murder, people leave their doors unlocked.’

‘So?’

‘All the security is on the outside. Who’d break in, particularly as it’s a total surveillance system?’

Vic was staring at her. ‘This is a fucking guess?’ he demanded, appalled.

‘Pretty much,’ Elodie said as she produced a hammer, a screwdriver and a number of tea-towels from her coat.

‘And what do you do if you’re fucking wrong?’

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to attack the S-sats and hope they kill me, and eventually Scab will decide to download a backup personality into my body. I certainly can’t do another day of school without fucking murdering someone.’ She paused. ‘Possibly everyone.’

‘So a privacy swarm to buy some time, and then what?’

Elodie took the hammer and the screwdriver and, using the tea-towels in an attempt to mask the sound, she started trying to drive the chisel point through the hard plastic case of the ground car’s central column.

‘I’m not saying there won’t be a lot of internal security,’ she said as she hammered the screwdriver through the plastic. ‘I think they’ll have amazing security. What I’m hoping is that they’re overconfident enough that a good intrusion expert and some top-end Pythian programs will be enough to bypass it.’

‘To do what?’

‘To create a diversion.’

‘And we’re in the car because there’s no ’face tech, but the cars are linked to the AI.’

Elodie nodded. ‘Give me a hand with this,’ she said. Vic reached down, and the two of them pulled open the crack in the plastic that Elodie had made with the screwdriver. ‘It was either here, or try and use one of the comms or media devices in the houses, but I reckoned there was more chance of someone finding us there.’

The central plastic column contained material that looked more like tech to Vic. A number of wires ran from a cylinder containing a blue gel. Elodie removed the kitchen knife she had taken from Vic’s house.

‘Hey! I could have used that earlier, when I was preparing dinner,’ Vic said. Elodie gave him a disparaging look. ‘Sorry.’

Elodie hawked up another mouthful of phlegm and then used the knife to pierce the cylinder before spitting on it. The spit visibly branched out inside the blue gel, reminding Vic of arteries. The spittle also sealed the hole made by the knife. Elodie closed her eyes and started to concentrate. Vic watched her. His skin was starting to itch. It had turned red and blotchy in places, and he suspected this was the result of Elodie’s privacy nano-swarm, and whatever counter-swarm their jailers had released.

‘Well?’ Vic asked.

‘Vic, I need you to shut up.’

Vic lapsed into a sulky silence and tried not to scratch his fragile skin. The porch light of the house they were sitting outside came on. A man in a dressing gown, wearing glasses and looking just like every other male inmate on Suburbia, was walking down the drive towards them. He opened the car door. Vic looked up at him and tried to smile, but ended up sort of grimacing.

‘Hi there, can I help you?’

‘This is your problem,’ Elodie muttered, her eyes closed, still concentrating.

‘Do you want to have human sex?’ Vic blurted.

Elodie actually opened her eyes and turned to stare at Vic.

He shrugged. ‘I panicked,’ he told her. The man was confused, since he had expected canned laughter.

‘Well, gee, I’d love to but I’m—’ He stopped, his expression suddenly fixed and blank. The whole cast of his features became more calculating and malevolent. ‘This isn’t going to last, is it?’ he said.

‘Er, what?’ Vic asked.

The man grabbed him by the hair – Vic was surprised by just how much that hurt – and dragged him out of the car.

‘I think I’ll take you up on your offer.’ He threw Vic to the ground. Vic turned it awkwardly into a roll and came up on his feet. His body still felt very awkward, too fleshy and with not enough limbs.

‘It was just a distraction!’ Vic shouted desperately. ‘I didn’t really want to do it.’

The man advanced on Vic. Vic hooked a kick into the back of the man’s leg, sending him staggering down onto one knee. Vic threw a punch with his left lower arm. Too late, he remembered that he didn’t have lower arms. The man got back to his feet. Vic kneed him in the groin, the chest and the face in quick succession. As the man staggered back, Vic hit him with a right-fisted haymaker, then back-fisted the man with the same hand. There was the solid, flat sound of meat hitting meat at velocity. The pain that shot through Vic’s hand surprised him. The skills may have been hardwired into this body, but that didn’t mean the body, though healthy, was conditioned for combat.

Something glittering and made of steel flew through the night air towards him. Vic caught the kitchen knife Elodie had thrown by its handle. As the man turned back towards Vic, he rammed the blade through his neck so hard that the point of the knife came out of the back. The man dropped to his knees drooling a lot of blood from his mouth, the neck wound bubbling. Then he slumped to the ground.

‘Cucumbers are better, motherfucker,’ Vic told the corpse.

Elodie was standing in the passenger doorway of the ground car. Despite the violence, and the dead person, the night appeared quiet and still.

‘Well?’ Vic asked. ‘What did you do?’

It started with the sound of grass breaking – the universal sign of impending chaos. Then the screams began.