The Prince and the Program, page 35
“It’s a… something,” I said. “I can break it. I think. But I won’t be in any shape to walk, after. You’ll have to go ahead without me.”
“I’m sure that would be a fantastic idea,” said Alan. Did I detect sarcasm? “Do you want me to be ridden by a psychopath’s Demon? If so just say the word.”
Manipulative Alan. “You know, it’s rather unfair of you to play on my jealousy when you are of no mind to—”
“Intruder alert,” said a female voice issuing from hidden speakers somewhere in the ceiling.
One by one the lights on the keypads started turning green.
“Troubleshoot mode,” called out Gen-Mai. The lights stopped turning.
“Hello, Bitch,” said the voice. “Waiting for commands.” The filaments strung across the corridor spluttered, but held.
“We rushed the build,” Gen-Mai said. “Her backdoors are all wide open. Gertrude,” she called, louder, “List processes.”
“I’m sorry Bitch, I can’t do that.”
“Directory.”
“This folder contains one individual object of class Demon. Would you like me to list its methods?”
“No.”
“No. Resuming Intruder Protocol.” The Soulless beyond the doors started moaning. “Can you call me a good girl? Gabe always calls me a good girl when I do it right.”
“Good girl,” said Gen-Mai, “But wouldn’t you rather play a game?”
“A/S/L?” asked Gertrude.
“I don’t play that game,” Gen-Mai replied. She sounded almost prim. “What about Scrabble?”
“Scrabble is very boring,” Gertrude said. “I’d rather lock you into an office.”
“Defragment Primary Storage,” commanded Gen-Mai.
Immediately, the black-green slime blinked out.
“It won’t hold her for long,” said Gen-Mai. “Move.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” I said.
“Go. I can deal with Gertrude.”
“How are you planning to do that?” Alan sounded curious.
Gen-Mai smiled at him. “We are both creatures of your imagination, in part,” she said. “But I was the one you gave your nightmares to.”
The envy was not so strong this time. My heart still ached.
“You remember the solution?” Alan asked.
“Of course,” said Gen-Mai. “Go!”
The walls bubbled and warped as Alan and I started running down the corridor.
“Primary Storage Defragmented,” said Gertrude. “Resuming Protocol.”
“Would you like to play a game of chess,” I heard Gen-Mai say, her voice growing fainter with every step, “to pass the time?”
We didn’t hear Gertrude’s reply, but the moaning stopped, the scrabbling sounds behind the closed office doors suddenly gone, as we pushed open the door at the end of the corridor, into the emergency stairwell.
Three corridors with identical blue industrial carpeting branched off the stairwell landing.
“Splitting up would be the logical choice,” said Alan.
“I’m not leaving you alone.”
“I would like to remind you, once again, that you are currently the fragile one.”
“You think I’m being silly?”
“Perhaps… overprotective?”
“What do you think?” I asked the dog. It whuffed, then licked Alan’s hand. “Traitor.”
Alan merely looked at me.
“Fine.” It had to be. I was fragile. Not for long.
As Alan and the dog looked on, I lay down, seeking what semblance of comfort the carpet allowed. I arranged my body as carefully as possible.
Then I left it.
The body didn’t twitch. It had been too much to hope for, I suppose, after the multiple heart attacks and the running.
“Puppy, this was Ian. Watch him carefully, okay?”
The dog wagged its tail, and sat down beside the corpse. Alan nodded, and started down the central corridor.
Alan was made of titanium. Alan was a genius. Alan was also a Demon. Titanium. Genius. Demon. It became my mantra as I set off down the leftmost corridor.
THE farther I went, the quieter the air became, but it was a muffled quiet, screams smothered with a pillow. At the end of the corridor there stood a lone metal door with a lock bar across it, a red “22” stencilled on at eye height. The door was vibrating as if a giant generator was running behind it.
It was useless to expect that those that lay behind the door were not forewarned of my coming. The time for stealth had passed; now it was time for strength. Pushing down on the lock bar, I let myself in.
The room was smaller than expected, a dark space barely ten meters by ten. Gabe, his back to me, was silhouetted against a wall full of black-and-white screens filled with flickering snow. He sat on the floor, at the center of a Demonic Sigil whose lines gleamed wetly in the TV light. But there was no smell of blood or any of the human odors I was used to associating with Gabe.
The ceiling tiles overhead were stained with water damage and mold, a mere half meter above my head. The place should be stinking, but it seemed my senses had been robbed of their access to the world. Even the quiet was deafening—as I circled the room, keeping clear of the lines drawn on the floor, I saw the side of Gabe’s jaw move. He was chanting, and there was not a sound to be heard.
A moment later, Gabe’s face came into view, and my heart gave an involuntary wrench in my chest. His eyes were gone, gaping sockets starting out at me from his skull, fibrillous strands of nerve endings and blood vessels leading from the inside of his skull to hang, tattered, above his cheeks. His head twitched, from time to time, and always at the movement, his lips formed a particular word I couldn’t quite read.
“Gabe?” I whispered. Suddenly, sound returned to the room, the hiss of static from the screens behind me filling my ears. It was not purely random; some pattern hovered in it at the edge of understanding.
“Come closer,” the pattern said. Gabe had stopped chanting, his breathing both ragged and shallow.
“No.”
“Defiance,” hissed the static, “will serve you not at all.”
“Shut up.” I was concentrating on the lines on the floor, looking for weak spots. No idea what “weak spots” in a Demon Summoning would look like, but surely there must be some. Did it matter to me? Raising my right foot, I stepped on the outer boundary of the drawing.
Gabe was shuddering, asthmatic wails dragged from his throat as I rubbed out the lines with my foot, one by one. It was definitely blood, though I couldn’t smell it yet.
“You’re hurting your friend.” The voice sounded gentle, remonstrative.
“No, that would be you,” I muttered. Stupid Demon.
“So much arrogance,” whispered the voice. “How long will your wards hold me out, Adept? You should have run away when you could. But you are here, and you will be mine.”
My chuckle must have caught the Demon by surprise; the static crackled behind me. A five degree arc in the Sigil was gone now, my path to Gabe almost clear.
“No wards,” I said. “No shield. You’re welcome to try to take me if you can.”
“Very clever,” the voice said. “But whatever spell you have cast, it won’t last long.”
“It just needs to last long enough,” I said. Let him hunt for a spell where there was none. Let him look for a chant, when it was Alan’s name that was wound upon my soul.
“You’re welcome to try helping Gabe if you can,” the voice said. “He was very useful. He had a pretty mouth.”
Gabe’s mouth hung open, dried blood caking his deeply cracked, parched lips.
Speakers hidden somewhere behind me suddenly started playing music—an extremely irritating country jig, its cotton-eyed notes tapdancing out of tune on the back of my neck.
“Gabe, what are you doing?” I murmured.
“Oh, he can’t do anything,” mocked the voice. “All me.”
The quality of light in the room changed, and the Meme started playing on the screens. Yo Ho. But it didn’t loop around as I expected. Instead, another man walked onto the screen and punched the “Yo Ho!” man in the face. Resounding applause, then a British commentator voice cut in with a “Well Hit!”
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“Look closer,” the voice suggested. The gif froze midframe, but something was still moving, the pixels jittering in place. No. Not pixels.
People.
There were two million pupils on the security monitors of the Russian Consulate, watching me.
He took their eyes.
The horror of it made even me catch my breath. “This ends now.” I didn’t know who I was talking to. My chest burned.
The static cascaded into my ears in layers, whispered laughter, like sheets of rice paper rubbing together. “What are you going to do, ‘free’ him? Another blind soul staggering off, dead, not able to be reborn? Do it.”
“No.” Freedom is for Demons. My head cocked to one side, contemplating the dancing black-and-white dots. Some percent of that was radiation from the big bang.
“Your friend is suffering, Necromancer. What do you plan to do for him?”
I smiled. “I plan to kill him.”
For a moment, the Demon was confused. It was all the time I needed. I crossed the floor and lowered my lips to touch, glancing, Gabe’s cracked and bleeding mouth.
The eyes on the screen dissolved, leaving behind powdered snow.
MY BODY, naked, sat on a thronelike swivel chair in somebody’s overlarge office. Eyes formed on my skin, popped open, then sank below the surface under the onslaught of sensory information, only to be replaced by more eyes. The shifting ocular mass, the prickle of half-formed eyelashes, it made me want to scratch and scratch and scratch. But the Demon had taken care of that; I didn’t have any nails, just eyes at the tips of my fingers.
My heart was beating in sync with the Symbiot’s incessant replication. Soulless bodies knelt at the periphery of the room, chained to filing cabinets. Their faces were familiar, but I couldn’t quite work up the memory of their names. It didn’t matter. I was safe in here, tucked away in a corner of my mind. No more decisions. No more suffering. Just watching.
So this was true possession. Necromancers defended the dead, befriended them, spoke out for them. It was only right that the dead give us something in return. It made me happy to finally receive the peace I deserved.
I watched the Demon open my mouth.
“Hello Alan,” it said. “I’m so happy you could make it. You have such pretty eyes.”
“Where are the souls?” Alan asked.
The Symbiot—the Demon’s Symbiot, now—was working very hard. It was hard work, keeping this body functional with all those eyes to take care of. Not to worry, the Demon would feed it soon.
But first it had to finish its conversation with Alan-in-a-robot.
“I put them somewhere you will never be able to retrieve them from,” it said. “Now. Kneel.”
NO.
I rose like a wind blowing across the sea: swift, fickle. Power flooded the plain of my outermost mind. My true name was a roar, a tide, and it shocked the Symbiot into stillness.
The Demon lunged, but its possession worked in my favor. The Restriction cut a swath of pain across me, but the Demon took the brunt of it. The Symbiot, bereft of command, shifted, and something other than eyes formed at my temples—antlers, of seven tines, from the stag whose genome had been the second my virus tasted.
Eyes, screamed the Demon. But every eye was trained on Alan’s face, a dewdrop fallen from the sun under the halogen lights. Fragments of memory, tusked boars fiercely defiant of the Desert, surfaced.
Eyes, screamed the Demon again.
You want eyes? The Symbiot dragged out of itself the eyes of a hawk. Hawk eyes recognize nothing of a Demon’s fears. Hawk eyes herald a swift death.
“Mordred.”
Alan’s speaking of my name was the height of poetry. It was a star lily I had seen once, its pollen dusting my fingers with a memory of the most beautiful of flowers.
The Demon greeted my reminiscence with a torrent of foul-mouthed curses. But I was wise to the ways of Demons now, and like a salmon, quicksilver, I swam against the black-green current.
Suddenly, lighting arced across my back, twisting my spinal column, branching through my muscles, disrupting the Symbiot’s division.
I am the tree, and the lighting. That is my Power.
But the Demon just laughed. And the Symbiot, confused, laughed with it.
I needed Alan to speak again. But he was silent, and the determinism in his silences held a dark secret, a gravestone not yet laid.
The stinging of a thousand bees at their Queens’ commands riveted me in place. Fire blossomed across the curves of my brow. Pressure, like a plate of continental crust, pressed down on my head. Wave after wave of eyes spawned across the tip of my tongue.
After the ninth such wave, I couldn’t force the eyes shut.
Breath by breath, I was dragged under, the ruin of the body I left behind a grave of every one of my vain hopes.
Then, “Mordred,” a voice whispered, right in my ear. “Listen.” The Demon couldn’t hear it, the voice that whispered code to me in fragments, hidden in the white spaces between breath.
Gravity set the path of the Sun at the moment this Universe was born. The moon was set to spin the day it was cleaved from the Earth. Once divisions are made, they cannot be summed. The sea is not a courtesan, to be fascinated by false magnetism. Mountains had names long before men dared to climb them. All power flows as a river, even, close-held, the power within people.
It was too much. I screamed, and in my screaming, I factored apart my voice from the Demon’s.
ALAN hovered over me. “Is it gone?” he asked.
Talking was going to be a little difficult, what with the Symbiot trying to patch my throat with rods and cones, poor confused virus.
Alan came closer, till I could see my own grotesque visage reflected in his metal. He looked into one of my eyes, bubbling up from beneath the skin of my right cheek.
“I suppose it is,” he said. “Can… can I get you anything?”
Pants. Please.
As if he could hear my thoughts, “Some clothing might be in order,” Alan murmured, looking around.
We both heard the clink of chains at the same time.
Or maybe we could get out of here, first. Really, my dignity is a small price to pay for keeping our souls intact.
“Um… perhaps we can find you some trousers later,” he said, then turned around to consider my form. Picking me up was going to a bit difficult, given the extraneous limbs and antlers and whatnot. Alan solved the problem by the simple expedient of walking around behind the executive chair, taking hold of its back, and pushing it forward.
The clinking of chains grew louder, interspersed with moans. Corporate exorbitance has a place—the heavy-duty wheels on the chair turned smoothly under Alan’s prodding, out of the office and all the way down the long length of corridor toward the emergency exit.
I had the Symbiot under control by the time we reached Ian’s body and the dog standing over it. It wagged its tail, once, twice, to see us, but remained silent.
“Good puppy,” I said and pulled myself to my feet. The eyes were still a problem but confined painfully to the underside of my skin for now.
“I see you’re feeling better,” Alan said, as he pushed the chair away toward a wall. Slowly, I turned toward him, met his eyes. Thank you.
Alan ducked his head. “Um. It was nothing, really.” Embarrassment radiated in incongruous waves from his frame. About to protest, I suddenly realized the true cause of his discomfort.
“Sorry,” I muttered, even as heat rushed to my face. Where could… right.
Mouthing a thousand silent apologies to Ian, I liberated the cargo pants and sweater from his person. The camouflage-print briefs and undershirt looked so very strange by themselves, but they afforded him a small measure of defiance against the featureless corridor.
THE third door opened into darkness, the hallway’s energy-saver lightbulbs doing little to illuminate the gloom. Again, Alan had a solution—a light, in fact, built into his fingertip. I felt inadequate.
“Light switch, light switch,” I muttered, groping at the wall as the door closed behind us.
Click.
WE STOOD in front of a two-story brick house. The air smelled unfamiliar, of city and leaded gasoline.
Alan stood shock still, staring at the front door of the house.
“Where you would never find them,” I said, softly. “Where you would never go.”
The mechanized susurration that issued from his speakers could only have been a sigh.
“All dreams must come to an end,” he said. Then he reached forward without ceremony and pulled the door open, only to be met by a small avalanche of dry, powdery snow.
Inside, the snow had collected in knee-deep drifts against the walls, in the right angles of the stairs leading upward, the least-walked spaces around the furniture. It glittered blue in the light of Alan’s LED.
There was too much of it. The Howling. It’s all mixed in.
Upstairs.
ALAN-that-was lay on the bed on his side, his left arm hanging beside him, palm open. A woman in a brown skirt was bent over him, smoothing the hair on his head.
“Safe now,” she whispered.
Before Alan could react, I moved forward. Really, there was only one way this could go. Bending down, I pressed my lips upon his.
The Howling is coming.
A BLIZZARD blows snow into the room, and whenever it touches me, it turns crimson. The wind gathers the snow on the ground in heaps, pools of blood-red pitting the surfaces. The red pools have dark spots floating in them, here and there, like the seeds of a watermelon. Mostly brown spots. Some are blue, some green, some gray.
“This is going to take a while,” I say. “There are an infinite number of matches.”
Alan smiles. “Stylistic variations, remember?”
