Something lands on the roof; metal clangs against metal. Airborne glances up at the sound and his face lights up. I mean, literally lights up; I could swear that dark skin brightened for just a second, but I blink and it’s gone. I hear scuttling sounds, but it’s dark up there; I can’t see anything but the ghostly dim shapes of rafters.
“Don’t worry about that.” He jerks his chin at the ceiling. “That’s the least of your problems.”
More sounds from overhead; a soft gritty patter of displaced dust drizzles down on us. Those rafters look like a rib cage. I flash back to a half-remembered Bible story from the Vision channel, something about gods and whales. I wonder for a moment if some alien monster hasn’t swallowed us whole.
“You are so fucked,” Airborne says, and his voice is—empty. Transparent. As if the man has already gone away, and left some kind of autopilot in charge.
“There’s no time,” it says, and I can see I was wrong; the man hasn’t gone away, not yet. He’s still trapped in those eyes, one red, one white, jerking back and forth in panicked little arcs while the chassis short-circuits around them. But whatever’s running the voice is still online, and it’s got priority now. “It’s up to you now, soldier. I can’t do this anymore.”
Suddenly those red-and-white eyes lock onto mine. They drill into me like restraining bolts, like spikes through my head. I really don’t like what I see in there and I try to look away, but no dice; I just about pass out from the effort. And he’s starting to glow again, there’s a kind of mesh lighting up his cheeks from inside, like honeycomb. Dude has one of those bioluminescent tattoos, you know, the ones where they inject the glowing bacteria? The more excited you get the more they light up—it’s a blood-flow thing, dissolved oxygen and whatnot—and this dude must be very fucking excited because that honeycomb is just about incandescent in his face, man, like those old lightbulbs with the filaments.
But I’m fading again. I can’t hold focus, I can feel myself passing out. I might as well have snowglobes for eyeballs, there’s so many floaters swirling around in there. The whole damn world disappears down a spinning tunnel, into a vortex of static with those wild wild eyes at the center, and that sad dead voice behind them saying This is the best I can do . . .
And something engulfs me from behind.
It’s like being devoured by an oil slick. Something warm and slippery wraps around my arms and legs and chest and at first it hurts holy fuck it hurts, but then the pain recedes and whatever steps up to take its place is really nice. Way better than morphine; it takes the edge off the pain but it doesn’t make you the least bit stupid.
My head clears. I experience new thoughts, I experience old thoughts in a whole new way. It’s unprecedented. (I can even roll worlds like unprecedented around in my head without feeling like an asshole, although I’m not sure how I feel about that.)
But it’s not just that my brain is firing on all cylinders again; like I said, it feels good. I figure it must be one of those new dopamine analogs you hear about, and then I remember where I heard about it: It was a MacroNet puff piece I caught out the corner of my eye for fifteen seconds two years ago. Either I really am dying and the whole life-before-your-eyes thing is way overrated, or this giant alien slug has just amped up my memory somehow.
My vision fuzzes and clicks into a kind of high-def crystalline focus that doesn’t quite seem real, you know that ultra-high rez you find in raw tactical sims and cheap video games. Alphanumerics start scrolling up across my field of view, boot sequences and tactical overlays, but they’re inside me somehow, you know? It looks subjectively like a head-up display but we’re not talking about your usual HUD: Something’s planting these glyphics directly into my head. More of a, a Brain-Up Display I guess. A BUD.
I’ve got my legs back, I’m upright, I can move again. I bring up my arm and there it is, the muscle suit, crawling around my forearm like an octopus as I clench my fist, flexing and tightening and accommodating every movement. It flickers as I watch; waves of light and darkness chase each other across my arm like storm clouds on fast-forward. Colors bleed along their edges—deep-sea green, stratospheric cerulean, who knows what the marketing boys are calling those parts of the spectrum these days. Suddenly my arm disappears, turns into liquid glass and just fades. A progress bar grows across my eyeball; a readout underneath tells me that CHROMATOPHORE INITIALIZATION SEQUENCE is 87 percent complete. When it hits 100 my arm fades back into view—just boring utilitarian gray again, laced through with a faint hexagonal mesh that looks a lot like Airborne’s tattoo (I guess ol’ Airborne doesn’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to accessorizing). Tactical says CLOAK OK.
I am Gabriel. I am Golem Boy, I am my own hope and my salvation. And even though I must still be a pile of shattered bones and torn-up viscera inside this magic armor, somehow I feel just fucking awesome. Even wild-eyed Officer Airborne kneels before me, hands raised in supplication.
Except that’s not what he’s doing at all, of course. He’s bolting me into this suit of his, tightening the last couple of lug nuts on my sternum. “Feels good, doesn’t it? I bet it does. Gets old fast, though. Believe me.”
Something’s changed about him. The spasms haven’t stopped, the tremors are as bad as ever, but that demon in his eyes, that panic—it’s gone, somehow. His face is dark; the tattoo’s gone back to sleep. The right eye is completely opaque now—a solid ball of scarlet, you can’t see anything in there anymore—but the left is almost peaceful. He fixes me with this sad, steady stare, and he says, “It’s alive, you know. Obsessed, you might say. It won’t move on until I do, it’s . . . viral. But it means well. Keep that in mind and you just might pull this off.”
Pull WHAT off, I try to say.
He answers as if I’ve succeeded. “Find Gould. Nathan Gould. It’s all I can do now, you’re all I can do. I’m sorry, man. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s all on you now.”
He can barely stand, he’s shaking so hard. There’s a rattle in his chest I’ve heard too many times before. He staggers, turns, takes in the filth and the dereliction looming on all sides. “Look at this fucking place,” he whispers, and even above the crackling of flames and the groaning of distant wreckage and all the faint faraway screaming, I can hear him perfectly. I swear I can even hear the beating of his heart.
“They used to call me Prophet,” he says. “Remember me.”
And puts a service pistol under his chin and blows his own head off.
Assault And Battery
Holy shit.
What do I, what just—
Fuck fuck fuck.
A cheery little overlay pops up while Prophet’s blood and gray matter trickle down my faceplate: CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS. NANOSUIT 2.0. Suddenly I can’t move. I’m in the middle of some kind of war zone, my entire squad has been massacred by a flying saucer from Zeta fucking Reticuli (there: I said it), the one guy who might have been able to give me some answers now ends at the mandible, and my magical new dream suit has stuck me in place like an ant in amber. Something’s stomping around on the roof, acting in no way scared or cautious or the least bit worried about being discovered. Which only goes to emphasize how very much I should be feeling all those things.