Manifestations (12 page)

Bleck!
he swore to himself. It was all just games until he got back on the Weave. The scripts he was pulling were textbook, available to everyone who wanted them. They’d be useless against a hakka.

Hakkas could go where they pleased and do what they wanted to whoever they chose. The only thing that was meant to stop them were the weavers and rangers. But obviously the hakkas still did what they did without any hindrance from the ‘good guys’. Zach had been misled.

A message came into his box with no sender attached.

: Come on, runt. Don’t hide in null space forever.

Zach: Who is this?

: The one who gives you nightmares.

Zach froze. Images of rape and mutilation repeated in his mind’s eye.

: Come on, Zach. I won’t do it again. Promise.

Zach: I’m locked off from the Weave.

: ZZZZZ.

Zach: They’re watching me.

: Just say the word, runt, and I shall set you free.

Zach thought about it for a moment. He looked out on the empty vista of the null space. Greyness to the non-horizon.

Zach: What’s the word?

: Please, of course.

In his immersion lounge, Zach swallowed and locked in a fresh backup.

Zach: Please.

The null went black, then Zach blinked and he was standing in a field of green grass with exaggerated flowers. The sky was a solid blue mockery of the real world, laughing brightly behind one perfect tree.

He looked at himself, swivelling a camera view for a looksy. He had been changed into something like a rabbit that stood like a human. He tried to assert his own image into —

‘Don’t do that.’ A familiar female voice came from the shade of the tree. ‘They’ll detect you pretty quick if your avatar appears. Don’t you like your disguise?’

Zach stepped closer to see the speaker but the shade was as exaggerated as everything else in this place.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I want to see what you look like.’

She laughed. It was a thousand laughs all played at once. ‘What does it matter what I look like? I have a thousand avatars. All different.’

Zach could see eye whites and fangs and a heart-shaped face in the shadow.

‘What do you want me to look like? Hmm ...’ she mused. ‘What do little boys like?’ In blinks, she changed and stepped into the sunlight. She was a kind-faced nanna, wearing a flour-dusted apron with lace on every hem. ‘Does this make you feel better, my sweet pudding?’ Blink, she was a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a weathered face. ‘Maybe you need a father figure? Stay strong, lil slugger. You’ll get there.’ Blink, she was a short, naked woman with a wet sheen from toes to breasts. ‘Or maybe you’re old enough for something like this.’ A long finger touched his rabbit nose and — blink — he was staring at himself.

‘This is from your latest backup, isn’t it?’

He nodded.

‘You didn’t hide it from me very well, Zachary.’ Gashes suddenly striped the face and blood ran down into his neck. ‘Whatever happened to the samurai thing you had going?’

‘He was stupid,’ Zach answered.

She laughed again, through his image and with his voice.

‘Who are you?’ Zach asked.

‘Me?’ She pointed at herself. A blur of avatars flashed past, stopping on the giant red monster he had met in the dance hall. Its many maws gnashed its teeth and drooled at him. ‘My name is Dungeon,’ she said, before swallowing him whole.

~ * ~

‘Zach? Zach, are you okay?’

He opened his eyes and saw Bron staring down at him. Just moments before he was being force-fed images of living bodies being dissected, animal heads kicked across grey streets like footballs, the makeshift balls bulging and mutilated beyond form. Gently, he reached up and touched her cheek.

‘You’re real.’

‘You were screaming. What were you doing?’

‘Nothing.’ He pulled his hand angrily away and sat up. He’d sweated through his gown and was feeling the cold.

‘You went back on the Weave, didn’t you?’

‘No,’ he answered.

‘You aren’t supposed to —‘

‘I didn’t. I was just in the null space.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said and turned to leave.

He grabbed her arm roughly. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

‘I have to. You’re not meant to be immersing.’

‘No.’ He twisted her arm, stretching the skin beneath.

‘Stop it, Zach. That hurts.’

‘Don’t tell.’

‘Let go of me or I’ll scream.’

‘You can’t tell them —’

Bron yelled with all the power in her lungs. To Zach it sounded like a thousand screams at once. He saw the bodies decomposing. Blood and violence and torture. He saw the images again and he fell backward.

~ * ~

Lizney was furious when he heard. As furious as he could get, but Zach didn’t listen to his teacher’s impotent rants. The weirdie was too weak for real anger, too old. Too timid and too twisted up in his mentor role to have real rage. Too useless to even have a symbiot. Zach hated him.

From the cameras of the omnipoles, Zach surveilled Lizney’s unit. Inside, his teacher moved to the window and pulled the shutters. There was a storm coming.

He learnt a lot from Dungeon, even if he did end up in her torture chamber again and again. She showed him how to split his stream, leaving his avatar running routines while he slipped into an unrecorded mode; freeing him to explore the Weave again. He still didn’t know how she kept swallowing him and transporting him places, but if she came for him again he had a plan to find out.

Whenever he went online she found him. Then they would play her game. He would run, she would chase. He would change his avatar and she would twist it. He pushed her off, but sooner or later she ate him up and mutilated his soul. ‘I am Dungeon,’ she would say and his little body would flail with excitation.

Zach tried something he’d seen Dungeon do in their last game of cat and mouse, burrowing into the nodes of the Weave that acted as data conduits. They were the invisible traffic conductors, but from within he could watch anybody’s stream; he only had to identify it. Which was easy because he could filter the flow to the specific location.

It seemed his teacher was immersed. Zach followed his stream, piggybacking so as to leave no trail of his own. He found himself looking at that street corner where Dungeon had first dropped his chewed-out avatar.
Now what would Mister Lizney be doing here?
Zach wondered.

His teacher didn’t do much. He looked along the street and up towards one of the housing units. It looked exactly like the others, though this one had an edge of flowers where the walls met the turf. Zach looked at the address, and saw it wasn’t where Zach had been dumped. This was a different sector entirely.

He began looking for connections between Lizney and the area, and discovered that this house was where his teacher had grown up. In a relocation town, which meant that he was ...

‘Spawn,’ he said, whispering into Lizney’s ear.

Zach demersed and sat on his couch. He looked around the small room. It was dark. Hail was hitting the roof like a snare drum and everything seemed to rattle with it. He folded his visor up and put it in his pocket. It was time to graduate.

With a hard umbrella, more like a shell that went over his top half, Zach ventured out into the storm. It was grey, the pavements strewn with white slippery hailstones all the way to the track entrance.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. He would be punished for going on the Weave, but he had also succeeded in finding out his teacher’s secret.

Lizney didn’t meet him at the door. He sat in his chair breathing loudly as Zach entered.

‘It’s not time for our session,’ Lizney said.

‘I thought I should come. To see what happens next.’

‘You should sit. We must discuss this.’

‘Discuss what? I know what you are now. I’ve passed your little test.’

‘You weren’t meant to be going on the Weave,’ Lizney croaked. Zach shrugged. ‘I’ll have to report this.’

‘Well, now I know your secret it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing more you can teach me.’

‘So you found a different teacher, did you? That hakka?’ Lizney asked. Zach didn’t answer or look to meet his gaze. Mister Lizney stared over his spectacles at him and sighed deeply. ‘If you don’t talk to me, Zach, I see no point in you being here.’

‘You can’t kick me out. I need to be here.’ Now he looked up, but Lizney could no longer read what was in his eyes. Zach used to be so open, but now the mix of emotions was heavy and impossible to discern.

‘Why do you need to be here?’

‘If I’m not in your classes, then I’ll be downgraded. I’ll be moved out of the home.’

‘And you don’t want that?’

Zach twisted. Anger flared and he bit at the inside of his mouth. ‘I don’t care. Do whatever you want, spawn.’

Lizney shuddered as if bitten, his cup of tea spilling down his legs. Zach looked at the floor, a greasy grin splitting his mouth.

‘What did you call me?’

‘Spawn. That’s what you are, isn’t it? Örjian spawn.’

Lizney felt his blood heating and he jumped up, running to the kitchen, where he tore open a drawer and peeled a patch. He felt its prickle go through his skin and at the count of five he felt the calm. The tension went out of his fists and his jaw stopped reaching to bite.

One patch wasn’t going to be enough. Bent over, arms and legs longing to lope, he reached into the open drawer for another fix. The patch released its soothing drugs and he sat down on the tiles. Calm at last.

‘You’re disgusting,’ he heard the boy say from behind him.

Then the front door opened and shut and Mister Lizney stayed on the floor calmly cursing himself.

~ * ~

Zach’s feet took him homeward. His mind echoed with the argument. He took the stairs down to the tracks and was three along before he realised he had no home to go to. Zach stood where he was and let the track pull him along.

It was always night down here. Rectangular lights paused overhead and the tracks hummed and ticked at their own speeds. Zach watched all kinds of people who were going to all kinds of places. Most stood like he was, others strode along the ninth track, speeding past at seventy clicks an hour, plus their walking pace.

These ones seemed accelerated. Faster than your average human. He looked at them, trying to see what it was that made them so intent. But they were all different. Girl cliques and suitboys, repairmen and Servicemen. Freakers, mutators and transcenders. He wondered where they were going.

He let the tracks take him south through Corona, the Angeles, all the way to the end of West where he had to dismount from the fastest to the slowest footway so he wasn’t thrown off at the end.

There was only one exit, a wide ramp to the surface with cargo lifts sliding up and down with boxed goods. He’d never been this far before. It was all farms and pharma out here, straight fenced-off tracts patrolled by servitors. Beyond that were the parks, the wild lands that had been returned to mother nature.

Zach went and stood by the first fence. There were three separate cordons, each decorated with warning signs not to enter. Humans didn’t go on the pharms without protection suits, but they didn’t need to either. A frame of rods and wires carried hanging automatons from plant to plant, inspecting, pruning, spraying and watering. Some of those crops would just be enhanced with minerals and vitamins for food consumption, others contained medicinal modifications that animals shouldn’t come into casual contact with.

The bots didn’t change what they were doing with him there; they zoomed around in their efficient business and he watched.

Behind him a long, champagne-coloured squib slowed down and honked. One of the back doors opened and a girl about his age called out to him. ‘Hey, Musashi. You wanna come for a ride?’

Zach peered inside. It was a luxury model, plush and clean and buffed so that every surface radiated the glow of the lumen edging. The girl sat on the crimson seat. She had white hair and was covered neck to toe in black rubber.

‘Are you Dungeon?’

‘She sent me to find you.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Alicia.’ She patted the seat beside him. ‘Come, sit with me. We’ll go somewhere.’

Zach looked around. Nobody was looking, there was nobody to look. The servitors continued their routines. He looked Alicia over, the rubber hugging her slight form, and got in.

The door closed and the squib pulled swiftly to speed. She turned to him, one elbow on the headrest so her hand could play with his hair.

‘Dungeon says you’re a bad boy. I think you look kind of sweet.’

‘Thanks?’

She moved her face closer to his. ‘Do you think I’m pretty?’

Zach swallowed. ‘Yeah, of course.’

She kissed him savagely and began moving her hands over his arms. Zach had never been kissed and he followed her lead — if he didn’t he feared she would eat him — grabbing mouthfuls of air when he could.