I turn the corner at Spruce.
I have no idea what happened here. I think this used to be City Hall—three stories of arched windows, topped by a domed tower almost as high again—and I think the space in front of it used to be a park. But some giant has jammed a spade into the crust of the planet and just twisted. There’s a rift in front of me, a canyon where the ground has opened up. The road runs off its edge and ends in tatters like a hacked-off limb. An eighteen-wheeler leans over the break, cab dangling in midair; it looks almost curious, craning its neck to see down into the pit. Broken sewer pipes jut from the cliff face. There used to be a subway line down there, too; it’s been chopped in half like a worm by a shovel, the track line pulled into daylight and torn apart, subway cars scattered around the gap like cheap-ass Chinese toys. There are outfalls everywhere, and fires, and down through the mist and the smoke I see the vague shapes of uprooted trees and fractured asphalt.
There’s something else down there, too, something deeper than the merely human wreckage. I can only catch glimpses through the pieces of rock and road blocking the way, but that segmented bony aesthetic is almost familiar by now. Way down deep, built into bedrock under one of the most densely populated cities in the world: an architecture that couldn’t have been put together by anything we’d think of as hands.
Way off on the far side of City Hall I see a silhouette in the smoke; it looms maybe twice as high as the dome that foregrounds it. Another Ceph spire, and I’m praying to fucking Allah it’s already shot its load.
This is Tick Mecca. This is the point of their pilgrimage, this is where they bring the liquefied dead of Manhattan: a clacking, clicking river flowing down into the center of the earth.
“You have to go down there, son,” Hargreave says solemnly
I’m not your fucking son, Jack.
But I go down anyway.
What happens if I just say no? Good question.
I was keeping an eye out, you know. Ever since the suit mutinied at Trinity. That was a kick in the throat, man—kinda paled next to being dead, but it added insult to injury. Like I’d been on a leash all that time and just hadn’t known it, because SECOND’d never yanked me to heel before.
It never tried to pull that shit again. Of course, I never tried to cross it again. It fed me objectives and I pretty much went along with them. And most of the time, why wouldn’t I? BUD points out the most likely local spots for cached ammo and I’m not going to weapon up? Hargreave offers my life back if I follow the parade and I’m going to go in the opposite direction? Why? Just to prove I can?
Still, what if I tried?
Of course, those were early days, before the N2 really got to know me. We have a much better relationship now. Now it would never lock me down against my will. It just makes sure I’m always willing.
You do know how this thing works, right? They’ve told you that much, at least?
We’re not talking about a meatport here, I’m not one of those new cybersoldiers with the spinal jacks. We’re talking about carbon nanotubes and room-temp superconductors. Synthetic myelin. Tendrils finer than human hairs burrowing into me, sniffing their way up and down my backbone, twisting up through that hole where the spine enters the skull.
You don’t wear the N2, you mate with it. You fuse. And it feels pretty good at first, let me tell you. It feels great—and after a while you start wondering why it feels so great. A neuron’s a neuron, right? When you get right down to it, what’s the difference between sending signals to my visual cortex and sending signals to any other part of my brain? BUD shows me unreal images; who’s to say SECOND doesn’t give me unreal thoughts, unreal feelings? A bit of icy calm to help you figure the angles before a big dustup? A bit of extra hate to help you mow the motherfuckers down in the crunch?
Dude. Spare me your pitying looks. You think you’re any better off than me? Did you get any say in how your brain was wired up? You think all that sticky circuitry you call thought just makes itself? Every effect has a cause, man: You can believe in physics or you can believe in free will, but you can’t have it both ways. The only difference between you and me is, I’m part of something bigger now. We’ve got a purpose, Roger, bigger than yours, bigger than your bosses’, so much bigger than you. So you might want to start asking yourself if the people behind those cameras are the sort of folks to whom you really want to pledge your allegiance.
Because there are other sides to be on, you know. And maybe it’s not too late to get on the right one.
You have to go down there, son.
Turns out I’m not the first guy he told that to.
There were these tremors, apparently. A dozen seismographs grumbling about something under City Hall, even before the ground opened up. So just a couple of days ago, Jack Hargreave sent a squad down into the subway. Their signals garbled. Their signals stopped. They haven’t come back.
Hargreave sends me down the same tunneclass="underline" a long dirty intestine lined with train tracks, torqued and twisted and torn open enough to let in occasional shafts of dirty gray light from overhead. I share the passageway with occasional ticks, but they’re headed the other way and they don’t bother me; their bladders are already filled to bursting. I imagine stomping on them and watching them go splat. Once or twice I indulge the fantasy.
Fifty meters in, the tunnel opens into a subway station. The walls are cracked and oozing, the overhead pipes burst. Puddles on the floor. Most of the lights have been smashed; a few hang from the wires at one end, sparking and flickering. There’s graffiti all over the walls, FUCK YOU and EAT THE RICH and THANK YOU LORD. Trash bins kicked over. Shotgun blasts and little high-caliber divots scattered like terminal acne over every surface.
Actually, it probably doesn’t look much different than it did before the invasion.
There’s a blood trail smeared across the tiles, around the corner, into a crumbling backstage service area. I find three bodies at the end of it: CELL, but not the usual mall-cop colors. Better armor, for one thing. Different insignia. More—understated.
“My men,” Hargreave murmurs. “I’d hoped . . .”
He sounds almost choked up. Almost sincere.
I give him a moment, scavenge the remains: frag grenades, laser scope, ammo clips. A scarab with a cracked handguard. One of those nice big L-TAG smart grenade launchers that grunts like me never seem to get their hands on.
“Casualties of war, I suppose. We all make sacrifices.” Hargreave has come to terms with his grief. I never knew the traditional minute of silence could be so therapeutic. “I don’t see Reeves here, though. Don’t see the scanning gear, either. See if you can find it; it might give us a little advance warning on what we’re heading into.”
I find him through a rusted fire exit, halfway down another tunnel where the loading platform is high and dry and the tracks themselves are knee-deep in the water table. Derelict train cars, knocked off their rails, sit in the water like gondolas in the world’s most butt-ugly Tunnel of Love.
Mitchell Reeves lies dead on the loading platform with two of his homeys, twitching under the ministrations of a pair of ticks. I waste some ammo on a bit of cheap visceral satisfaction, pry Reeves’s field laptop from his cold dead fingers. The tech’s proprietary from boards to buttons, but the I/O’s standard WiFi.