The Eternal Prison (33 page)

 

I turned and ran after Grisha and Marko, who were carrying an inert Dick Marin between them, like hunters returning with their prize.

 

 

 

 

XXVIII

I THINK OF HIM AS LITTLE DICK

 

 

 

 

I sat shivering with my back against the cold, damp wall of the old sewers. A small nova lamp gave us some bleak white light and harsh shadows, and the walls shivered at irregular intervals as the F-90s dumped destruction down on Manhattan. My lungs burned, and I was shaking a little, feeling feverish. I kept seeing Krajian, pouring every coming decade of energy and violence inside her into one five-minute spread. I counted twenty-three cops. Twenty-three dead, most from near-perfect headshots. She’d walked onto a field filled with hundreds of cops—officers of her own rank and skill level, Stormers with their shredders ready—and killed twenty-three before they’d taken her down. For those last moments, Krajian had reminded me of Janet Hense, whom I’d admired as sort of the patron saint of hardass, emotionless bastard cops until I’d found out she was an avatar, one of the earliest ones. Maybe. Who knew how long Marin had been quietly grinding his force through his big avatar machine?

 

I looked down at
my
avatar. My face was bloated and ruined, slack and damaged. Grisha said it was still functional; they’d put it into a “stasis” mode. I wanted my imprint burned out of it, destroyed, and Grisha kept telling me it was low on the priority list. Looking up, blinking Krasa out of my eyes, I guessed I agreed.

 

A dozen feet down the tunnel, Marko and Grisha were hunched over our second avatar, the Marin. Three voices drifted back to me—Grisha’s throaty growl, Marko’s soft, rounded words, and Amblen’s artificial, generated voice that still managed to come off dry and unamused.

 

Marin’s avatar was a perfect copy of him. Or a perfect copy of the avatars I’d already seen—who knew what the hell Marin had actually looked like before he’d been converted into a digital intelligence. It lay there with its chest torn open, a slight grin still on its smooth, waxy face.

 

I looked back down at the muddy stream running through the old tunnels. I felt terrible—raw and scraped and shivery, like I’d spent too much time out in the open eating nutrition tabs and drinking runoff, gritty water scratching at my teeth. Shortly after our raid on the cops down at the Battery, the army had thrown another carpet-bombing party, and The Star had been turned into a smoldering crater right in front of our eyes, the heat wave intense enough to reach us across the fucking river. So we’d hunkered down in the sewers, the good old familiar sewers, clogged with shit and mud.

 

I thought of Marlena. I’d gotten used to having her warm body next to me at night, crowding me. I thought of her less and less as days went by, but she still popped into my head now and then. I wondered where she’d gotten to, if she’d even survived. If Michaleen hadn’t just shot her in the head when they’d cleared Chengara and pushed her out the drop bay.

 

A particularly thunderous round of distant, muffled explosions sent a rain of grit down on us. Marko and Grisha threw themselves over the sliced-open chassis of the avatar, cursing. The Russian stood up as far as he could in the tight tunnel, rubbing the small of his back, and turned to stumble over to me, sitting down hard right in the muddy stream and shaking his head. My ruined avatar lay between us.

 

“You are maybe hoarding cigarettes I do not know about?”

 

I shook my head. “I’ve quit, until I can find more.”

 

He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand that had a thin layer of dried white coolant on it. “Me as well, yes.”

 

I glanced at Marko, who was staring into the Marin avatar’s guts like it might hold the secrets of the universe. “How’s it going?”

 

“Ah, not well, Avery. We have managed to keep unit from damaging itself and have disabled internal security. We have been able to reprogram the implanted algorithmic intelligence—Marin—to take orders. This is easy. We cannot, however, do anything with the external security requirements. Encryption I have not seen. Encryption
Amblen
has not seen. So we cannot connect it to its network, or it will simply be remotely disabled. Useless. Amblen says there are ways to solve this using molecular memories and reverse compression routines, but we do not have the equipment or the power lines or the”—he paused to throw his hands around in frustration—“conditions for such work.”

 

I nodded, feeling nothing in particular. “So it’s a bust.”

 

Grisha shrugged. “Not completely. We have the unit in working condition. Another stored personality could be implanted into it, and no doubt Marin who was functional until a few hours ago has useful information, yes? And we may yet find ourselves in better conditions, able to continue trying to crack it.”

 

I smiled again. “Better conditions? Sorry, Grigoriy, but in my experience the conditions go in one direction: fucking downhill.”

 

He smiled, teeth white in the gloom. “Yes.” He looked back over at Marko and the avatar. “How does some… thing like that become most powerful… thing in System?”

 

That’s easy enough,
Dolores Salgado suddenly spoke up in my head. As she told me the story, I translated it for Grisha.

 

“Easy: You take a broken, half-dead failed System Pig and test a frightening new technology that’s pretty much fatal ninety-nine point nine percent of the time on him and make him into the first avatar. Then you put programming into his digital brain to make sure he behaves, and you make him Director of Internal Affairs because you’re scared to death of your own fucking police force and terrified to give anyone that kind of power—but you can secretly control him through his programming. Then he figures out how to engineer a crisis that allows him to suspend his programmed limits. Then he forgets to terminate the state of emergency, forever. Easy peasy.”

 

Easy peasy,
Marin echoed in my head.
Unlike what you’re attempting over there, which won’t work.

 

Grisha smirked. “So what does this creature do with such power? Free the slaves? Make reparations? No. He —”

 

Marko suddenly stood up and stomped over to us, squatting uncomfortably next to Grisha, careful that his pants remained dry. The ground beneath me shifted violently for a second or two, and more dirt drifted down. Marko’s glasses caught the glare of the nova lamp and appeared to be made of white light.

 

“It’s, uh,” he said, nodding his head once in a definitive way. “It’s asking for you.”

 

I squinted at him. “Excuse me?”

 

“Marin. The, uh, avatar.” He pulled his eyes up to mine for a second and then looked back down at the ground. “It’s asking for you.”

 

“The fucking avatar,” I said, “is asking for me.”

 

I looked at Grisha, who shrugged his eyebrows at me. “The fucking avatar is asking for you, Avery. You afraid of the fucking avatar?”

 

I pushed myself to my feet, leg and back barking, and winced. “Fuck yes,” I said, staggering off.

 

The avatar looked just like him, or at least as I’d seen his avatars look, except for the torn-open abdomen, the wires and black boards spilling out of it, and the pool of off-white coolant around it. As I approached, it grinned and turned its head toward me in a stiff, jerking motion.

 

“Hi, Avery,” it said, voice melted and distorted.

 

I squatted down and reached out, took hold of its glasses and pulled them off, revealing a pair of perfectly normal-looking green eyes. They immediately crinkled up as it grinned at me.

 

“New model, of course,” it said in the now-familiar gurgle of a damaged Monk or avatar. “The eyes are made from a special polymer we actually can’t make anymore. They’re in short supply, and we’ve been forced to have a strict recycling policy.”

 

I put a smile on my face. I’d been making my face smile for so long it was automatic and meant nothing. “Whose are these?”

 

Its grin snapped on in the familiar, sudden manner. “Original issue, Avery.” It cocked its head a little, a spurt of coolant drooling out of its chest. “You know, I was told you were dead. I wasn’t surprised. I am surprised now. Are you seeking revolution, still? Is this another scheme to destroy the world? Tell me otherwise, Avery. Don’t be a striver.”

 

Do I really talk like that?
the Marin in my head said.

 

“I’m looking for someone.”

 

Its smile widened. “Who?”

 

I shook my head. “I need you connected to your central database, your main unit. The Big Iron. I need real-time information, and I need you to be able to reach out your whole long arm and sift it all for me. Besides”—I tapped my head—“somehow I have you in my head, after you tried to
process
me in Chengara. I think of him as Little Dick. He’s actually kind of chatty and answers questions. I guess he doesn’t have your programmed restrictions in place.”

 

Marin said nothing for a few beats. If it hadn’t been shielded and torn open, I’d have thought it was listening to its own data stream, collating real-time data from a thousand sources a second. Then it cocked its head again. “Little Dick. That is
amusing,
Avery. But I know what you’re going to ask me. You are sadly predictable—after our last transaction—in which I
honored
our agreement, I’ll remind you, you spent much time and energy prosecuting revenge against
me.
Revenge is in your genes. And I can tell you even without being whole that I don’t know where they are.”

 

I nodded. “Sure. But you have the whole SSF. You have every fucking System Pig in the world. Every SSF database, scan check, snitch, and paid informant. When I have you connected, and persuaded, you can find him.” I reached out and put its glasses back on carefully. “I like you better this way.”

 

“Even if you somehow communicate successfully with my Prime, Avery, and somehow compel me to help you—which would require a degree of ruthless efficiency I have yet to observe in you—there is no guarantee that I will be able to locate him.”

 

With a grunt and a loud pop from my knees, I got to my feet, ducking my head. “Director, you don’t know everything. And I know a little more than you think.”

 

It twitched, its whole chassis undulating in one quick movement. “Why, Avery—incompetent, yes, but as always, full of surprises.”

 

I walked over to the two Techies. “Well, boys,” I said. “Pack that fucking thing up and let’s make some plans. We’re going to Moscow.”

 

Marko looked up at me with a pained expression. “Ah, shit.”

 

 

 

 

XXIX

AN ESTIMATED LIFE SPAN OF UNTIL THE UNIVERSE CONTRACTED INTO A HEAVY DOT

 

 

 

 

“What is that
smell?
”

 

As was becoming my standard policy, I ignored Mr. Marko and kept the avatar between us. Marko had a dispiriting habit of stepping into my line of fire at awkward moments, so I liked bouncing him off obstacles.

 

“Come,” Grisha said without looking around. “I know of a place.”

 

I hugged myself tighter against the endless wind and tried to remember the last time I’d sat in a heated room, comfortable. Shit, before the Plague. Me and Belling and Glee in the back room at Pickering’s, sweating our way through a bottle of gin and collecting gold badges. Then one day I’d been snatched to Newark, and I’d been freezing, burning, aching, and bleeding ever since.

 

I glanced at the avatar. It was grinning. Motherfucker couldn’t feel cold.

 

Stay strong, you’re doing god’s work,
Squalor muttered.

 

I shut my eyes and pushed them all back, re-creating my mental bubble. Even then I could feel them grumbling, pressed against its glassy walls, watching me. I opened my eyes again and took one last look around.

 

“Impressive, isn’t it?” the avatar said in my voice. “Very old, those walls.”