Transcendence (22 page)

“
You came here for a reason,” Jonathan said. “Do you have a fix job for me?” He hoped and hoped Blackjack would say, yes, why yes, we need you to slip past the security systems of a local warehouse; or, yes, we need you to crack the security at a small info trader or a city ganglion. We’ll be on our way now if you join us.

But reality never works like that for Jonathan. Even back then, he knew better.

“
Jonny boy,” Blackjack said, “you should have let me know you had a pump. Good boys share.”

“
She’s not a pump!” Jonathan shouted, already regretting the outburst. “Sorry. But she’s not like that. We’re friends. Please let her go. I’ll do whatever—”

“
I don’t like boys that way, Jonny boy,” Blackjack said, not looking at Jonathan but at érase. Broken bricks and bits of concrete were scattered around her, as well as cigarette butts and snapstick wrappers. The antique furniture seemed to laugh at Jonathan and his foolish dreams.

“
I like girls, though,” Blackjack added, finally tossing the lump of snapstick into his mouth. He stepped toward érase, but Jonathan got in his way.

“
Leave her alone,” Jonathan said. He felt Blackjack’s muscular tension burn his skin. “She and I are friends,” he added, pleadingly.

“
So are we,” Blackjack said, his tone of voice unreadable, “and you failed to share something of yours. Don’t I always share my things with you? I share space on my ’board, I share food and clean water and any programs you want. Whatever you want, I find a way to get it. And here you have something I’d like to share. That’s the way things work.”

“
Yeah, you little fucking pervert,” Lucas said, bending over érase with his clawed fingers extended. “Intheflesh . . . I never would have guessed it of you, Jonny. You always seemed so normal.”

Jonathan flicked on his city landscape and descended on the little node that was Lucas’s card—the safest way for him to attack since no one in the gang could manipulate the net like he could. He slipped down the electricbright channel into Lucas’ head and loaded a new program to find what he needed. A menu flashed to life around him as he stood in what looked like a power plant control room, all switches and screens and dials. Jonathan selected POWER SUPPLY and hit it with the biggest burst of EM radiation he could sap from the netways. Then he pulled out . . . all this in less than a second.

Lucas screamed. His shark 3VRD vanished. His fragile white hands pressed against the sides of his skull as he fell face first onto the pallets.

“
The little mannequin just burned me!” he shouted. Gone also was the smooth voice, replaced with a cracking adolescent’s.

“
The rest of you keep away from her,” Jonathan said. Four others wandered through the 3VRD wall, all dressed in their chosen 3VRD costumes. They looked like a child’s nightmare of a circus. These were the people Jonathan had come to think of as family, almost friends, but now he saw only a threat to the fragile dream of perfection he had held just minutes ago.

“
Jonny boy,” Blackjack said, stepping closer. “You’re going to owe big for this, you know. Now you’ve not only broken our faith but also hurt one of my drones. I’m—”

“
Get away from him, Blackjack, you piece of shit!” érase screamed, bolting upright beside Jonathan.

Jonathan felt his heart race so fast it felt as if it would burst. Gently, he placed his hand on her side and pushed her away. Distracted by her, he didn’t notice as Blackjack’s hard hands went around his throat and threw him onto the ground two meters away.

Jonathan lay stunned for a few seconds, not sure what had just happened, coughing on dust and blood and a broken tooth. One side of his head felt numb and hot, where it had struck the ground. His ears rang. Angry screams dragged him from delirium.

“
Get away from her!” he bellowed, rising unsteadily to his feet and running toward the gathering of gang members around the Queen Anne bed where he caught glimpses of érase’s scarred skin, and he ran howling at the boys and men, animal hatred making him forget that his intheflesh body was no match for any of them, forget the cards in his head and his fantastic aptitudes with them, forget everything but the furious young woman whose slender flailing limbs battered the circle of Malfits who laughed and chided her.

Someone tripped him, and he fell again onto his face in the rubble and dust. Lucas stood over him, his frazzled black curls a halo of death around a face twisting with agony and hatred. Lucas, barely more than a boy himself, descended on Jonathan, and then the next hours were lost.

When he later awoke on the ’board, Blackjack had put his arms around Jonathan and held him tight.

“
Thanks for sharing, Jonny boy,” he said, his face as rigid as stone. “She’ll keep your homies well-stocked in legal currency. You’re a smart boy to deliver us such a fine pump. Over time, that should more than makes up for the damage you caused.”

And then Jonathan had cried, not over his bruised and immobile body, but in knowing his dream with érase in their home beneath an arching ceiling would never come true, knowing he had been a fool all along ever to believe it could, knowing it had never been more real than any other 3VRD, knowing she would not survive beyond another few days, though perhaps her body would. She was still an adolescent, without parents, unfranchised; the beatcoats would never investigate her disappearance, and wouldn’t care.

He cried so long and so hard that not even Blackjack’s fists could break him of it. In time, the grief passed, as grief always does. And, afraid to turn it into anger at those who would kill him and punish érase for his misdeeds, those who could save him—his ’board brothers—he had built a virtual wall within so high and long and thick and impassable that no one could ever enter, not completely, not even in 3VRD, not even himself. It was a fortress not just in the metaphorical sense, but real in the virtual sense, as real as emotions or the mind. Without it he would have vanished as surely as the walls, had they been taken down. He could never again be hurt, would never again reveal himself to anyone who could see what he really was and laugh at him, call him worthless and small and all his dreams futile and foolish.

But he had forgotten to build a roof over it. That worked out well when he later wanted to build a spaceport at its center, to let the Captain touch down inside. This entry is safe because, unconsciously, he knows he’ll never meet that distant hero so many millions of kilometers away; he, one boy in 21 billion.

He spent the following months numbly breaking open security systems around Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as some more distant, where the only booty was information. Time made his loss seem less real. It even made him seem less real, and that was good. Work was good, the harder the better.

And then he discovered feedrapture, and became useless to Blackjack, though the gang leader attempted to break him from the systems-lock with fists and threats of death. But Jonathan only smiled inwardly at the futile efforts, taking pleasure in this one form of revenge, even if it meant sacrificing his flesh. There was nothing left of him by then, anyway. How can one sacrifice nothing? Would the immensity of the universe notice if one glass of vacuum vanished? Inwardly, as he was swept away on an ocean’s current of other people’s thoughts and programming, he laughed and laughed at Blackjack beating his nothing knuckles against Jonathan’s nothing flesh.

Some traitorous fool had shoved him into treatment, and he had awoken, stunned, empty. The nurses locked down his cards with a null field. Eventually, they nearly succeeded in shattering the walls of his inner fortress when they forced him to cry by asking him painful questions. The tears had fallen for days. Somehow, the nurses had implanted in him a desire to live again.

When he was released, when Charity found him and offered something that could be akin to what he had had with érase, Jonathan felt an odd sense of hope. When Josephine seemed about to communicate with him, Jonathan’s hopes rose, only to be destroyed. When he began his last-ditch trek toward the Malfits, that hope returned, ironic or not, since they were the ones who had nearly destroyed him. But they are his only family. They care for him in a sense his family never did . . . or care less than his family, yet that they care at all is somehow more valuable when family is expected to love you and their failure is so much worse than any shortfall from those whose love is unexpected.

That was then. Now, in a less than an hour, he will wake, finding himself buried under a hundred kilos of fat on satin sheets. All that remains is Charity.

The EarthCo fighter/bomber
Bounty
plummeted tail-first toward the growing orb of Triton. Its main rocket nozzle hung useless—the metal shredded like aluminum foil—from the end of the crooked thrust-tube. A vapor trail of hydrogen spewed from the ruined engine, spreading out before the ship and dispersing into the emptiness of space. Neptune lit the ship’s port pale blue, the sun lit its starboard orange, and stars cast its curving helm silver; a slight wobble and spin slowly altered the lighting on the gleaming hull.

Inside, Janus slid into her acceleration couch without any quick moves. Jackson rose from his couch, to her left, while Eyes, to her right, straddled the arm of his. His hand clutched the particluster subgun, aimed at Jackson.

Janus nodded to Jackson, hoping the vulgar cyborg had been as distracted as he had seemed a moment ago when she and Jackson had passed a few secret 3VRD words. She landscaped the ship’s controls into her splice, so a mosaic of buttons, switches, and readouts filled her pov. She waited, nearly shaking with frustration and anger.

At this very moment, the second nuclear missile was spanning the distance between them and the alien artifact, and with it the scientist with whom she felt such a kinship.

Though Jackson frowned as in pain, at last he nodded. What’s Eyes doing to him now? Janus wondered, but spent little time speculating.

Her mind’s finger reached hesitantly toward a red button—This is the only way, she reassured herself—while she also prepared the second part of the plan. She wedged her feet into the footrests, careful not to do anything to clue Eyes.

“
Lonny,” said Jackson, at the corner of her vision, “let’s be reasonable.”

“
I am being reasonable,” Eyes replied. His voice was as brittle as old paper. “This has gone too far. Someone needs to take control—”

Janus grit her teeth and engaged the maneuvering program. She couldn’t bear to watch Jackson, to see if Eyes’ gun fired and split her friend’s belly open.

A great explosion detached the thrust-tube—main engine, fuel tanks and all—from the ship’s globular hull. Almost immediately, retrorocket 3 fired full-thrust for three seconds, then retrorocket 7, then 2, then 8, then 9.

The ship first regained “gravity” for a moment, then lurched clockwise, knocking Eyes backward from his seat. It spun faster and faster, and Eyes began to roll in an arc toward the wall.

Janus dared to glance at Jackson. His body was still intact, ducking behind his couch. She heaved a great sigh of relief and put her own seat between her and the lunatic.

Then she depressed the red button. No turning back. No return. And she had to hurry.

“
Bitch!” you cry, tumbling across the textured metal floorpanels. You struggle to hang onto the hard comfort of the weapon, but to do so you give up control of where your body goes. Those fucks! Traitors! What have they done to your beautiful ship?

And then the nightmare:

The rearmost overlay on your pov flickers and dies.

They have burned the server.

You watch overlay after overlay fade. You feel the skin at the back of your scalp sparkle and twitch as you lose connection to sweet home Earth, to the program, to the computer. Only a few navigational systems are still operative. Life-support is still operative.

Confusion, disorientation. You can’t even think. The terror . . . you see a man hanging by his fingertips from a razorthin wire between two skyscrapers. A high wind whips him back and forth, back and forth over Boston. He savors the hot painthrill blazing in his fingers, but he knows another few seconds of this will mean death, and in death lies no pleasure. He looks this way and that, but each open window from which the wire threads seems kilometers away. His arms won’t move. The wind blows harder; he begins to swing like a pendulum. He can’t think. Nothing. The ground rushes up.

The acoustic tiles of the wall bump against your face. You blink and try to locate yourself. All right, stay calm. You feel cramps start in the muscles around your jaw. Relax and think. You feel the sharp outline of the subgun beneath your chest. The ship’s engines stop firing. You become lighter, stuck to the wall as if it were the floor. Now.