Barclay. I know that name. I heard it a hundred meters under the surface of the Atlantic, back in those innocent days of childhood when we thought gengineered Ebola or a dirty nuke was the worst that could happen, when we thought we were Lords of fucking Creation, when we thought we were such incomparable badasses that we had to make enemies of one another because no one else was up to the job. I heard it a hundred years ago, back when I still thought there was some kind of line between life and death.
I heard it this morning.
There is a chain of command. There are still backbones out here who know which side they’re on. There is a CO to report to, there is a higher purpose. His name is Barclay, and these are his men, and they have come to take me home.
And since Jacob Hargreave’s grand viral counterattack seems to be on hold, I have nowhere else to be. I saddle up and join the posse. I lost pretty much everything I was packing when the wave hit, but Chino’s new friends came prepared. I rearm and reload and help hold back the tide as we head for higher ground.
But oh, Roger, what thy masters have wrought.
There are no streets left, only rivers. Half the storefronts are still underwater. Streets have split down the middle; foundations, turned to quicksand, have given way and dropped whole neighborhoods into the earth. Ceph conduits lie exposed in the fissures, emerging from these masses of bedrock, disappearing into those: They’re everywhere under the city, like sewers beneath the sewers. We walk along the edges of newborn cliffs and see streetlights and shredded leafless treetops, more like roots than branches, barely breaking the surface. The buildings across the park are walls of pigeonholes, all torn open on this side. Anything more than five or six stories up seems dry. Everything else is draining; trickles from the upper reaches, cascades from lower floors that only just got back above the waterline. It’s actually kind of scenic: a great majestic matrix of waterfalls, tinkling and roaring and filling the air with glittering mist. The wave did absolutely nothing to stop the Ceph but it seems to have scoured the battlefield, left all the wreckage squeaky-clean. I see rainbows everywhere I look. Rainbows, Roger. Even nature’s part of the spin machine.
“Maybe it took care of the bedbugs, at least,” Chino says.
We fight north while the city drains around us. We evict Squiddie from a flooded Coffee Stop and make it safe for Free Enterprise again. We help out some marines getting their asses kicked by a Ceph gunship in Madison Square. Sometimes we go together, sometimes separately, but we always leave Ceph blood in our wake, pooling like mercury in the wetlands.
Good times, Roger, good times. Once or twice I even remember that I’m dead and it almost doesn’t matter; I’m doing more good now than I ever did when I had a heart. Not even Hargreave can spoil the party. He comes back online once or twice to complain about the dents and scratches I’m putting on his suit, but it turns out even a rich tourist like him has his own problems. He tells me events are escalating beyond his control. Welcome to the human race, Jack. But apparently he and the suit are already busy cooking up Hargreave’s new-and-improved Countermeasures Interface Soufflé, and that’s not gonna change whether I’m fighting Squids or surfing porn. Hargreave spells it out himself: What we need now is time, and if Barclay’s Badasses can buy us a bit of it, maybe I can help them get a better rate of return.
For once, everyone seems to be on the same page. Not sure how I feel about that. I guess you could call me ambivalent.
Now, there’s one of those words I never used when I was alive.
There’s a whole lot to feel ambivalent about these days. I’m sure you appreciate that. But you know what really strikes home when I think of that word? You know what picture illustrates ambivalent in this souped-up superconductor that used to be my brain?
My own guys. The backbones I fought side by side with. Grunts, regular army types. Even Chino, although he’d never admit it.
Some of the shit they say, when they think I can’t hear them:
I dunno, man, looks to me like something they’d build.
You think there’s anything inside at all? Anything human, I mean?
That suit guy. I mean yeah, he saved our asses but Christ he creeps me out.
Chino had to keep telling them not to shoot at me. Had to keep reminding everyone whose side I was on. Even my kill card didn’t help. The more Ceph scalps I collected the scarier I became, somehow. Golem Boy, The Unkillable Monster That Even The Ceph Can’t Vanquish. If I’d been a little less good at my job—got an arm blown off or something—maybe they would’ve trusted me more.
Of course, if I’d really wanted to prove that I wasn’t unkillable, I suppose I could’ve let them know that I was already dead. Probably just as well I didn’t, though.
Oh, you think my feelings are hurt. That’s not it at all. I suppose there’s some little module down in my midbrain that’s feeling wounded and alone, but it doesn’t call the shots anymore. No, what I am is concerned. Because I really don’t look like one of them. The tech may be Ceph down in the molecules, but the morphology is all human. I don’t look like one of them at all; I look like one of us in weird-ass body armor.
But these guys, they see through that somehow. Maybe it’s pheromonal, maybe I smell wrong or something, but they sense a truth their eyes can’t possibly detect. They know who I am, they know we all wear the same dog tags. But something about me still freaks them out, right down in the brain stem. Even though they can’t put their fingers on it. And that, to me, is cause for concern.
Why, Roger, because we have things to do. And it’s going to be a lot tougher to do them if we can’t get people like you to trust us.
Not to worry, though. We’re working on it.
The good times don’t last forever. The party screeches to a halt when Hargreave comes out of the closet.
“Hopefully I’m reaching your comrades, too, with this,” he says when he comes back online. “I’ve bounced this signal off your suit to their comms.”
He’s reaching them all right. Chino’s tapping his earpiece like he’s trying to dislodge a bug. “Who the fuck is that?”
“My name is Jacob Hargreave. You may or may not be aware that Alcatraz’s suit is evolving into a powerful bioweapon against the aliens you face. But in order to complete that process, a stabilizing agent is required. Ideally I would ask you to come to Roosevelt Island, but clearly that is impossible now.”
Chino looks at me. “Is this a joke?”
I’m feeling like my mom just showed up on the LAN in front of all the cool kids and asked me if I remembered to clean my room. But Mom is completely fucking oblivious; he announces that there’s an early prototype of said agent over at the Hargreave-Rasch building, right here in Midtown. He squirts coordinates: the familiar red line zigzags down wireframe canyons and comes to rest somewhere on East 36th.
“Take your colleagues with you; you will need their support. Please make haste, all of you. The Ceph will not wait on us.”
Nobody moves for a moment. Then someone says, “Did that civilian fuck just give us an order?”
Chino looks around at the congregation. “Actually, I’m gonna read that as more of a request. And we are talking about something that’ll kill the Ceph.” Now he’s looking at no one but me.