SYSTEM START flickers at the corner of my eye.
CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS.
SYNAPSE CHECKSUM . . .
The boot crawl scrolls over my visions, eats them away like acid. By the time it’s gone through its song and dance there’s nothing left to see but two words: PHAGE ISOLATED.
I can make out what the voice is saying, now. It’s telling me to wake up. It sounds worried.
It calls me son.
I open my eyes and look up at the dome of smoke covering Manhattan. There’s something up there that doesn’t belong somehow, bright threads of blue and yellow lacerating the overcast like veins of quartz. It takes me a moment to remember what it is.
Oh, right. Sunlight. Sky. It jerks for a moment, as if someone just fucked with the vertical hold in my eyes.
“Come back, son. Focus.”
Tactical returns, slow and halting. Icons flicker on and off and on again, as if not quite sure they’re in the right place. The sky jerks again, but this time I realize it’s not just my eyesight: Something’s—tugging at me. I lift my head.
Those fucking ticks. Those bloodsuckers. One of them has its hooks into the N2. It’s pretty much all the wake-up call I need: I hate those things. I kick the little fucker and am back on my feet in a second, reaching for a gun that isn’t there, looking up and down a street that seems to be hosting a goddamn tick parade. Some of them carry nothing but the swollen bladders on their own backs. One or two are actually dragging body parts, like ants taking crumbs to the nest.
My own personal chaperone is back, trying to take me down by the ankle. My gun lies a dozen meters away: Golem Boy don’t need no goddamn carbine to stomp it like a big ugly zit. None of the others seem to notice. They don’t seem interested in anything that moves under its own steam.
“I’m getting a limited feed from your suit, but for now it’ll have to do.” A little window opens up in my visual field and there he is, standard old white dude, maybe midsixties, looks like he was cut-and-pasted out of some black-and-white video from a hundred years ago. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. Jack Hargreave, at your service. Nathan Gould might have mentioned my name, although I don’t imagine he had much good to say about me.”
Actually, old man, Nathan says you want me dead.
On the other hand, Tara Strickland says you want me alive. It’s Lockhart who wants me dead, and I know for a fact that Lockhart has an absolute fucking hate-on for Jack Hargreave.
“I have to ask you to take Nathan’s opinions with a grain of salt. He’s a fine man, I think the world of him personally, wouldn’t have kept him on so long if I didn’t. But he’s also something of a fuckup, pardon my French. All those psychotropics he dropped out on the left coast—they’ve dulled his edge a bit. Not quite the clear thinker he once—well, we could spend hours on the long and sordid relationship between Nathan Gould and Jack Hargreave, but right now there are far more pressing concerns.
“You are standing not far from the diseased bureaucratic heart of this city. And while you’d think that airlifting all the politicians out of the place should have had a cleansing effect, sadly, what’s replaced them isn’t a lot better. Go on, see for yourself. Follow the parade.”
He does not pat me on the head or offer me a Milk-Bone. Probably only because the N2 doesn’t come with those options.
“By the way,” Hargreave adds after a couple of seconds have passed and I still haven’t saluted. “I’m given to understand someone may have told you you’re dead. I would urge you not to put too much faith in definitions designed primarily to allow the health insurance industry to cut benefits at the first appearance of a hangnail. Life and death are far more malleable than most people imagine, as you are finding out for yourself; and while, yes, you may technically fall into the latter category at the moment, I have access to certain—remedies—denied most policy-holders. Don’t you worry, son. I’ll be right there with you, and if you do this for me—for the planet—we’ll get you patched right up. After all, it’s my technology that’s already made you such an active corpse.”
He has a point. This, this high-tech infestation wrapped around me—it’s Hargreave’s property. He built the damn thing, or pirated it at least. He designed the people-friendly interface that papers over all those scary alien guts that I hope to Christ someone understands. And he’ll be right here with me. Of course you will, Jack. You are my Lord and my Shepherd, and you’ve probably been walking with me since the moment I died. A comm link without an off-switch is the least of your divine powers: I bet you’ve built overrides and remotes into every fucking circuit in this thing.
Still, that whole not-being-dead thing. That would be really nice.
Hargreave wants me to follow the parade? I follow the parade.
I’m in a shallow depression of cracked asphalt, a street collapsed into some hollow space below, ankle-deep in wastewater from half a dozen broken mains. Hargreave leads me from the valley of the shadow. He leads me through half-assed barricades, past schools of dead yellow cabs and burning police cars. Something bleats from the rooftops; I look up in time to see a blur of pink flannel before the baby bursts like a grapefruit against the pavement. Its mother hits a second later without a sound.
Infected. Infected.
“Stay the course, son,” Hargreave says sadly. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”
A woman cries out from a shattered window twelve stories above Liberty Street; a man and his daughter call for help from a balcony over Fulton. Sometimes I see them before they see me; I cloak, and creep past without ever raising their hopes.
He tries to distract me with tales of our mutual acquaintance. “Don’t get me wrong about Nathan; his heart is definitely in the right place, he’s the same humanitarian he ever was. He’s just—lost that edge that once made him so brilliant. That ability to make intuitive leaps, counterintuitive leaps, that distinguish the great minds from the merely competent. Case in point: He finds the black box in that second skin of yours and he just assumes it’s some kind of blueprint: the genspecs to fight the spore.”
Three stories’ worth of old iron fire escapes lie smashed on the sidewalk; someone’s hung a bedsheet from the railing of the fourth, painted a slapdash NEED FOOD & WATER for any Meals On Wheels truck that might be cruising past.
“Ten years ago Nathan would have seen the truth instantly. The suit doesn’t contain the specs for a weapon. The suit is the weapon. It just needs to be activated.”
He takes me through an abandoned field hospitaclass="underline" Quonset huts lined up in an underground parkade, all cots empty, body bags stacked in neat virgin piles. Down in some subterranean food court I pass through an improvised checkpoint blocked out in chain link and razor wire: rows of tables, suitcases and backpacks with their contents turned out and spread under racks of purple UV. Ticks clatter past, draining the dead while Hargreave natters like a Discovery Channel voice-over: “Think of the Argentine Cattle Crisis two years ago, or the British BSE outbreak in the last century. The issue was not slaughtering the animals, the problem was disposal. What do you do with millions of rotting corpses? Here you see the Ceph’s answer. They wipe us out, they break us down, they reduce the environmental impact almost to zero. Exemplary, really.”
The ticks have spilled onto Dutch Avenue. I’m starting to see that this isn’t a parade after all. It’s a drainage basin, full of little tick streams that join up to form mighty tick rivers that converge on—