Transcendence (79 page)

“
Can you put this on?” he asks. She doesn’t seem to even know he’s in the room with her. The withdrawal is immediate—Jonathan remembers. The hatred builds again, and again he feels the strange sensation of riding a crest in his brain, as if his meat is only being tricked into thinking it’s solid and standing on flooring while his mind goes netsurfing.

“
I’ll help,” he says. The dress has no arms, only short springy tubes that grip érase’s upper thighs. The upper part simply stays in place against her slight breasts by friction, no shoulder straps. Her dark aureole look like bruises behind the white mesh.

“
Fuck,” he mutters, and reaches back into the shelves. He finds a scarf and hangs it around her neck for better coverage.

“
That’s better. Let’s go.” Up and out the door; the lock is nothing to him, though he has trouble managing the rubberlike body he’s dragging along. Jonathan wonders for a moment where Nooa is, considers comming her for assistance in getting érase out, then abandons the thought.
I’ll do this myself
. His stomach burns.
She’s my responsibility
.

They pass dozens of pumprooms like érase’s, then stacks of mini-cubes with opaqued ultraglas doors. In the light of random lumnisheets, handprinters shine like worn brass on the lock mechanisms, the paint rubbed off behind the handles where countless knuckles rubbed as they opened the doors. One cube’s door has been wrenched off, and inside Jonathan sees the black skeleton of a gelbed frame. No window. The cube’s vent hisses like an angry snake. The whole place stinks of stale sweat.

érase is semi-conscious, still moaning, and growing heavier each step Jonathan takes. Her legs move as he drags her along, but they don’t support much of her weight. Finally, they reach a dropshaft, one of the retro fixtures used in low-rent places like this. Jonathan overlays the maintenance system, calls the mechanical carrier, and shuts out anyone else from boarding. The door grinds open before the hung platform has even reached the floor.

Jonathan drags érase onto the plastic floor with him and sets the machine to take them to ground level, 39 floors below. Overhead, cables and pulleys squeal and groan. They begin to descend with a jerk. Through the woven-hicarb net that surrounds them and joins to form the hanging cable, Jonathan watches amateur artwork—etched into the walls of the shaft—begin to flash past.

érase’s eyes, glazed and bloodshot, flicker open. She fixes on Jonathan’s face for a while, studying each of his features one by one.

“
Jonathan?” she croaks.

“
Full-out, my sweetmeat,” he says with a twitching smile. “You’re back.”

Head wobbling, she sits up. “What happened?” The platform’s floor-ring lightpad flickers, dulling to red, then brightens to a blazing white that makes Jonathan squint.

“
I crashed this place, babe. I’m setting you and everyone else free. We can find our dreams now, my érase. I’ve learned so many ways to get stuff. I’ve made powerful friends. We can go anywhere, and I mean any—”

Her head is shaking slowly side-to-side, and a sad smile crosses her face. “Jonathan, sweetmeat. I can’t.”

He feels his body knot up into wads of gristle. “That’s trash! I mean it, we can have anything—”

“
Jonathan, I’m Cheri now. érase
. . .
érase died a long time ago. She lost Citizenship. You know what that means? I’ve got nothing, not even Edufeed access.” Her voice begins to shudder. “You can’t imagine how much you’d miss Edufeed.”

Her eyes don’t hold him long; the pupils dilate at random. “If I try to make a case to reestablish érase, I’ll get prosecuted for falsifying—”

“
No!” Jonathan yells. He leaps to his feet during the ringing echo. “Crash it! The Brain—you know, the AI that networks EarthCo? The Brain’s a personal friend of mine. She’ll send us a spaceship and we can go somewhere, anywhere. . . .”

érase’s head keeps shaking. Jonathan watches her body begin to convulse as the withdrawal begins to set in. She falls forward to hands and knees and vomits clear liquid that gathers on one side of the tipping floor and runs over the edge. They’ve only dropped ten levels.

Jonathan lets out a growl that mutates into a scream. When érase’s fit recedes, he continues: “I’ll do anything for you, burn this whole city, kill everyone who ever laid hands on you, whoever even looked at you intheflesh. I’ll blow up the world if you want, if I can, and take you far away. We’ll—”

“
Trash it, Jonathan!” she shrieks. Jonathan falls back against the wall of hicarb mesh, which sags under his weight. He notices a reek of old dust and burned plastic.

“
You fucker,” she says, rising to her knees and then standing as best she can. “You fucker, who are you to tell me what I’m going to do with my life? Just like all the others. You think I’m going to leave now, after working in this
. . .
place for
. . .
I don’t know, months? Do you know what I’ve gone through here?”

Jonathan feels dizzy with anger and panic, his vision blurring, his inner ears sensing a distant roar. “But it can end when—”

“
Shut up.” Now she pins him with both her bony hands as hard as steel clamps. Jonathan’s instincts force his weight away from the precipice, nearly knocking her over in the process.

“
I’ve worked hard to get where I am,” she continues. “Do you know where your friends sent me at first, right after they killed érase?”

She shudders and a snarl rips across her face. She smacks Jonathan with the back of her hand; he hardly notices the sting—after all, it’s just meat.

“
Well, I’ve earned enough points to be classified legal applicant. In four months, I’ll be full Citizen again.”

Jonathan leans toward her, feeling the old emotions rise up again. “But I can do that for you now, with the Brain’s help.” He tightens his arms around her back. “Anything you want, I can do. Anything!”

The pulleys high overhead squeal again, and Jonathan notices an overlay glowing “1”—they’ve reached their destination.

“
Listen, boy. I haven’t gone through all this shit for nothing. I don’t want you, I don’t need you, I’ve grown beyond you. Now get out of my life or I comm the beatcoats.”

“
Dammit!” Jonathan powers up his commcard and sends for Nooa. She doesn’t respond. Panicking, he retransmits again and again. When the floor’s door scutters open and érase pushes him out, he closes his eyes and howls Nooa’s name across the BWs.

“
Please, Jonathan,” Nooa says as she appears in the foyer, paneled in flaking laminate, “I cannot help you.”

“
See, see?” he says, pointing at the AI’s construct.

érase frowns deeply and gives him a hard shove with her bare foot. “I don’t know you, you don’t know me. My name is Cheri, and next time I see you, I’ll feed you my fist.” She tightens her tiny hand.

Though she manages to keep her words strong and level, Jonathan sees her eyes begin to well up as the door slides back into place, blocking her from view. He splices into the platform’s retro 2-D pov camera and watches a girl crumple into a heap of scarf and lace and bony flesh as her body shakes. He can’t tell if she’s crying, vomiting, or laughing, since the pov is vid-only.

“
Fuck you, Nooa,” Jonathan says. After another few seconds, he shuts down his contact with the building.

“
érase!” he 3-verds her, full-power, fivesen, baring his emotions on his ephemeral face. But she only fires back with an old gang trick: His feed twisted and mutated and sparking random bursts of energy that shoot pain through his limbs. Even so, he doesn’t shut down, but she cuts him off from her end. She has vanished from his life once again, this time more permanently.

A moment passes. Someone in the shadows and ash-heaps of the foyer grunts and crunches glass.

“
Why didn’t you help me?” Jonathan says like a growl through his teeth, turning on Nooa’s construct. “I could have saved her from this. . . .
Crash you, you fucking heap of wires!” His wildly thrown fist sails through Nooa.

“
I didn’t do anything,” she states.

“
Damned right!” Jonathan turns away and begins crossing the narrow room to its gaping maw of an entranceway. A footpath is worn through debris and rubble. Only a hand-sized disc of lumnisheet still casts light against the darkness.

“
I chose to let you try to convince her without my help,” Nooa says from directly behind him. “Cheri would have been bad for you.”

Jonathan stops stomping ahead and turns to glare at her. The girl’s face tilts forward until she’s looking up at Jonathan through the top of her eyes. “I had hoped you would not go to her after traveling through the alien object,” she says. “érase was a criminal, and Cheri is even more poisonous. Before you met her, she was Blackjack’s
. . .
lover. I can only deduce that she used you—”

“
Never speak to me again,” Jonathan says.
Blackjack’s lover, crash!
He spits at the 3VRD. “And I don’t want your free stuff anymore, either.”

He turns and begins to run, bare feet crackling trash as he bursts out of the lightlessness into a rainstorm. Needles of water prick his bare back and neck as he stares across a barricaded street at the Hornworks of St. Paul, a low, block-long steel skeleton enclosing what had been planned to be the world’s greatest pipe-organ. That had been back in the early days of feed, when people still listened to music intheflesh. Vast brass and aluminum funnels lay twisted and oxidizing in the rain, left to rot since the project was abandoned. Jonathan senses a single note thrumming at the limit of hearing and imagines one of the discarded horns sings him a note of desolation, of understanding.

Like a feral beast, he whips around and stares up through streaking rain, up along the windowless face of the skyscraper. Its surface seems to shimmer and pulse as the note grows louder. Jonathan closes his eyes tight and wonders how he will go about destroying this society and replacing it with something like what he sensed in the alien place.
That’s the only way; this wreck can’t go on forever
.

“
The war,” he says, opening his eyes. Now his vision is even more hampered. He tries to blink away the wavering image. “No one will notice a few more deaths during a war.”

“
Jonathan,” Nooa says, “are you returning to the artifact? Your headcard signal is fluctuating.”

“
Is that so?” He takes a deep breath and searches his newly acquired memories for what this could mean. What he finds is something he, himself, learned inside with the Captain and Pilot.

“
It’s a destructive, uh, wave,” he says. He smiles his best razor-smile at the construct. “Once you’ve entered the alien toy, it becomes part of you. Well, when you’re inside, and when you let evil take you over—evil being hatred or hopelessness or that kind of shit—you feel this wave of self-destruction. It’s probably the same force that shatters your meat when you enter, only this time it’s trying to shatter your mind. The part of it that they call the ‘shell.’” In his ears, his voice sounds shrill and hoarse.

“
Well, my little shell is growing thick again. It’s like this: A Stratofighter’s wings cut clean through the air at top speed, right? But don’t try that with a fucking square skyscraper.” He reaches blindly down, grabs something cold and hard, and hurls it against the building. Not even a satisfying thump.

“
I gotta get going. I’m gonna do what Captain Jackson tried to do when he was a kid, only this time, I’ll do it right. He was afraid to hurt anyone. I’m not.” After a few deep breaths, Jonathan’s vision settles down a bit.

He begins to walk, then thinks to call up the aircar Nooa gave him yesterday. It lets him know it will arrive in just under four minutes.

“
Jonathan,” Nooa says. Her 3VRD speeds up to walk beside him.

Jonathan keeps his eyes straight ahead, watching Zone barricades piled one atop another like a half-dug archaeological site. He begins subscribing to shows at random, layering them one atop another, even cracking the seal his amp let him put over the edufeed. Faces and machines and buildings swarm in all directions before him.

“
Jonathan, I collected a lot of data from your cards as you began to be transported. I think—”

Jonathan doesn’t break step as he tilts his head to stare at her with a crooked smile. “Do you think I care?”

“
Well, I believe the data has applications to your current problem. Perhaps I can assist you when the wave begins to damage your atomic structure.”

Jonathan stops walking to bend over and laugh so harshly that his throat feels shredded. “You don’t understand,” he says, standing again. “I only need to stay together long enough to take care of a few things. The Minneapolis/St. Paul sprawl has only about forty prime gangs. I’ll be finished by sundown.” His smartass smile fades. “On second thought, yes, you can help me. But only until sundown.”