[ You can’t run human minds in a Totality environment. They work in a completely different way.]
[ No one told those two! I didn’t get too deep in, but there was some pretty sophisticated crosspatching going on. Oh, and there’s no fetchware in there at all. They’ve never been near a Coffin Drive. They became what they are as soon as they kicked the bucket.]
[Shit. What about the physical Yamatas?]
[ I’d guess clones, brains scooped out and replaced with nanogel mind nodes. Yamata runs them by remote control. Her signal traces back to Heaven. Harry’s off-Station somewhere. High Earth orbit, by the look of it.]
[ We should tell Ifor.]
[ What? He’s Totality, they’re on Totality platforms. I bet he’s involved. They’re stitching us up. Fucking squishies. We should have killed them all.]
[ This isn’t them. The Yamata clones are several copies of the same body. That’s not Totality, they value variety too much. They never repeat themselves.]
[ But what about Harry? He could be sitting in a Totality server on a snowflake somewhere.]
[ How would they have got hold of him? And why? No, it’s got to be Kingdom. Who else could get two human minds running on Totality hardware?]
[And you don’t want me to touch him. I hope you know you’re his fucking bitch, Jack.]
[ We’re going to get hard, undeniable proof of Kingdom’s involvement in all this. We’ll give it to Grey and East, and the Totality, and between them they’ll bring him down. We’ll be heroes, Fist. And there’ll be no risk of Kingdom getting his hands on your firepower.]
Fist yawned.
[ You’re sleepy?]
[ Repair packages calling. I’ve got to shut down for a bit. This is a boring conversation anyway.]
Fist grumbled back into Jack’s mind. Soon, little snores sighed up. Jack felt hugely relieved that he’d managed to defuse Fist’s excitement at his newly discovered capabilities. He wondered in a tired way how he’d keep protecting him from the damage he could cause. Thoughts of protection turned his mind to Andrea. He worried that Harry might have discovered their relationship, might still take his revenge on her. The past sighed in his mind. They’d worked so hard to hide things. ‘I don’t want to tell him until it’s right,’ she used to say. ‘Until I know for sure it’s serious. He’d be so angry if he found out.’ Jack reassured himself that Harry never had done.
As he drifted into sleep, other memories of their time together brushed at him, like waves caressing a darkening shore. There was Andrea as he’d first seen her, performing in a Kanji Town night club. Harry dragged Jack there after they’d argued about music. ‘I told you she was better than anything you Homeland fucks have, didn’t I? If she hadn’t fallen out with the Twins, she’d be the biggest star on Station.’ A single spotlight carved the pale mask of her face from the darkness, the rest of her lost in soft shadow.
There was the first time they kissed; a snatched, urgent intimacy that took both of them by surprise, after hours in a near-empty cabaret bar. Two half-empty glasses flared gold between them. Ice had melted into the whisky’s pale fire when at last they remembered to finish them. ‘You can’t pretend you’re not from here,’ she told him then, for the first time.
As she got to know him, she would drag him back to the streets of his childhood and force memories back into him. ‘It’s who you are. Not some Homelander that Grey made.’ He came to believe that she emphasised her Docklands accent when she was with him, used slang that she would normally skip over. He remembered walking past a playground with her. ‘I used to love that place,’ he said. Children still tumbled laughing through it. ‘Look at them,’ she said, ‘finding joy despite the world.’
Towards the end, he found it harder and harder when she went back to Harry. By then, he was living pretty much full time in his Docklands hotel. He was on first name terms with the staff, who turned a blind eye to her frequent late night visits. She was suffering, too. As her affair with Jack had become more serious, so her sense of guilt had grown. ‘He’s not always a good man,’ she said, as they argued one night, ‘but it’s the best part of him that loves me.’ Dawn found her hard-faced. ‘I have to go,’ she said again and again, making no move towards the door. ‘I have to go.’
Three days later, the rock fell.
Mercifully, sleep took Jack before that last meeting came to life in his mind. Memory’s weave drifted off him, tapestried moments falling away. His last conscious thoughts were of sweathead code. He wondered what he’d forgotten as he remembered his relationship with Andrea; what more challenging truths lay beyond his remembrance of their time together. And then at last he slept, too damaged even to dream.
Chapter 38
Fred and Lyssa never left the room. Fred painted the walls, laboriously creating images of a world that was entirely closed to him. Lyssa played with her dolls, imagining moments that would never happen. Ato was both young enough to come and go at will, and old enough to do so usefully.
For a couple of days, Jack let himself calmly drift between sleep and waking, allowing the healing that had taken place in both his body and Fist’s internal structures to fully bed down. Fist was dormant for much of the time. Sometimes they were awake at the same time and talked silently to each other. Fist was sleepy and distracted. Jack only stopped worrying about him when he started grumbling again.
[ I wish you didn’t have so many good reasons for not killing Kingdom. Why do you always have to worry about consequences?]
[ Because they’re always there to be dealt with.] Fist swore grumpily. [ But there’s something only you can do that I need some help with.]
[Oo, what thrills could possibly await?] sulked Fist. [Sending someone a text message? Finding out where the nearest train station is?]
[ No. Hacking fetch code. I want to free Andrea.]
[ Won’t that have AWFUL REPERCUSSIONS THAT KILL US ALL?]
[ No, because you’re good enough to make sure that nobody notices.]
[Motherfucker. It’s not enough that I’ve got to think about sodding consequences before doing something TOTALLY REASONABLE like killing a fucking god. I’ve got to reprogram your girlfriend, too.]
[ Not reprogram her,] Jack replied. [ Not at all. I want to protect her from that. Remember how much you hated it when Grey rewrote just a tiny part of you, just once? She has to deal with far worse than that, all the time. All fetches do.]
[ You sound like the Totality. Get your mate Ifor to sort it out.]
[Please. If not for her, then for me.]
[ It’ll be hard work. It’d mean understanding fetch permission structures, digging into how the weave manifests them and working out exactly how the Coffin Drives store them. Hmm …] Fist was silent for a moment, lost in thought. [ Fuck. That could actually be quite interesting. Useful, even.]
[ It’d be more than useful for Andrea.]
[All right, I’ll see what I can do. But it’s not an easy job. I won’t make any promises.]
[ Thank you, Hugo.]
[Don’t call me that,] snapped Fist. [Gods, you’d think we actually liked each other!]
Jack slept again until the sound of cooking woke him. The meat that Ato had brought back, crowing triumphantly about her waste-raiding skills, turned out to be spoiled, but the vegetables were edible. Fred boiled them in water over a small electric heater, creating something approaching vegetable soup. It smelt thin and unappetising, but Jack hadn’t eaten for three days so hunger jabbed deep into his stomach.
‘Hello,’ he said, yawning and stretching. ‘Do you think I could have some soup?’
‘No,’ snapped Fred. Ato shushed him. ‘Pour him a bowl of soup,’ she told Lyssa.
Lyssa – concentrating hard – tottered over to him with a full bowl. She smiled shyly, blushing as he thanked her, then turned and ran back to the table.