The door is open. The light inside is warm and inviting.
I walk in.
A flash bomb goes off in my head. Electricity sings, right down in my bones. I can’t feel my skin—no, the suit. We can’t feel the suit. We can’t move.
“EMP assault.” I don’t know which one of me is saying that. “Systems shutdown.”
“Ah,” Hargreave says from the other side of the universe. “That’s perfect. Thank you, Ms. Strickland.”
I’m blind. I’m blind. The whole world strobes around me in bright jagged flashes. BUD is nothing but tinsel and static.
“Check his vitals, would you? Then have him moved across to the skinning lab. We need to get him prepped as soon as possible.”
The bright light fades in time to see the floor come up like a kick in the face.
Outside I see nothing. Inside, my head is full of gibberish: FRDAY_WV and FLXBL DPED-CRMC EPDRMS and LMU/894411. GPS scribbles idiot wireframes across my brain: Digital Manhattan swings and twists like a tabletop model under an eight-year-old’s swing set. False Prophet reads out omens of doom, incantations full of critical shutdown modes and limbic integration overrides. Eventually the wireframes go away; something like an EEG takes their place. Falsey’s making a little more sense now: We’re switching to core function mode, apparently. Life support takes priority. Deep-layer protocols are engaging. Some kind of system reroute is under way.
That’s nice. Just reroute everything away from me. That’ll be perfect.
Footstep echoing against the shitty acoustics of raw cinder block. Vague, fuzzy bars of brightness passing by overhead. I can’t squeeze my eyes shut, so I squeeze them into focus: fluorescent lights. The EMP’s worn off but I still can’t move; I’m strapped to some kind of rolling gurney.
I raise my head in time to see it push through a pair of swinging doors into a cavernous gray room with tiled walls. Big blocks of machinery sit humming in all that empty space; the place reminds me of a furnace room or a physical plant, one of those dull grimy places infested with ducts and piping you find in the sub-basements of office towers.
“Just another grunt, I’m afraid.” Hargreave, still hidden behind his curtain, sighs to someone who isn’t me. “Prophet could have told us so much more.”
It’s not a furnace room, though. It’s an operating theater. I can tell by the lackey in the blue surgical scrubs playing on the keyboard up ahead, a CELLulite grinning at his elbow. It’s a machine shop; I can tell by the gleaming enamel spider bolted to the ceiling, each jointed hydraulic arm tipped with a laser or a scalpel or—
I’ve never seen a lug wrench with a built-in spinal needle before.
“At least we have the nanogear intact, that’s all that really matters. The rest I’ll have to improvise once I’m in the suit.”
The spider drops with a soft whir, comes to a stop a meter over my chest. It unfolds its legs, flexes each joint as if warming up for a marathon. Bits and pieces click together like chopsticks.
“Let’s get started.”
The table flexes around me, tightens my restraints. Lights wink at the end of those articulated arms; tiny saws whine into the ultrasonic, dip and weave and plunge. My bones rattle in their cage. Suddenly I’m seeing the world through blood-colored glasses.
Way over at the corner of my eye, the man in scrubs pays very close attention to the monitor on his desk. His eyes are bright and tiny over his surgical mask. They never look at me.
Just following orders.
“Ah, my young friend.”
Hargreave again. Deigning to address me directly. “I had hoped to spare you consciousness at this point, but the nanogear is not proving cooperative. I am truly sorry for this betrayal, but I really have no choice. I need the suit—this particular suit, in fact—if I’m to have any hope at all of stopping the Ceph. A simple soldier will not suffice here.”
My body goes numb. The room still rattles in my eyes, but suddenly I can’t feel the vibration.
“Don’t misunderstand me. You’ve proven far more resilient than I ever would have expected. You are a soldier, and a damn good one, and you would be an asset in repelling any invasion, alien or otherwise. But allow me to fill you in on a little secret.” I can hear the wink in Hargreave’s voice, I can hear him leaning in to share his little confidence. “This isn’t an invasion, son. It never was.”
I wonder if these restraints are even necessary anymore. I bet they’ve cut my spinal cord.
“It’s obvious if you think about it. Why would a race that can terraform worlds, that plans and builds across light-years, across millennia—why would they be interested in anything so vulgar as territory?”
My eyes go out. I’m in a black void: blind to the abattoir, numb to my own vivisection, cut off from everything but Hargreave’s voice, the snap of lasers, the whine of spinning bone saws.
“There was a time, son, when people tried to save the rain forest. Oh, they were an emotional lot, woolly-minded and disorganized, but a few of them knew that they could never get a shortsighted and indifferent public to care about a bunch of trees half a world away. People don’t give a rat’s ass about anything unless you can answer the question, What’s in it for me?”
The saws are gone. The lasers are gone. I’m deaf now, as well as blind and numb and paralyzed. But somehow I can still hear Hargreave here in my head. True to his word he stays at my side, walking with me through the valley of the shadow of death. Jack Hargreave is my universe.
“So the more clever environmentalists came up with an answer: There’s Taxol, there are antioxidants and anti-aging drugs, there are cures for every cancer and filters for all the shit we pump into the air. There are a billion compounds and a million cures, the rain forest might make you immortal someday, but we lose it all if we wipe it out without even knowing what’s in there.”
I know what this is: this cable-cutting, this endless monologue, this pointless fireside chat with the senile old uncle you wish would just shut the fuck up. This is deliberate distraction. This is an attempt to take my mind off what’s happening. This is Jack Hargreave being merciful.
I wonder if Prophet ever found out what it means, when a man like Hargreave calls you son.
“It was a good strategy, and it might have even worked, but then some company—actually, I think it may have been one of mine—synthesized Taxol. And then of course we arrived at the dawn of Synthetic Biology, and why leave all those millions of hectares undeveloped on the off-chance of some miracle cure when you can program artificial microbes to shit out whatever you need? The rest was history. As is the rain forest, sadly.”
I think he’s receding. His voice sounds—fainter, somehow. Hard to tell, with nothing to compare it with. Maybe it’s just my imagination.
“But the Ceph are so much smarter than we are. They know we can only see what we look for, we can only make what we can imagine. Nature—four billion years of experimentation, endless mutation and selection, Darwin’s tangled bank in all its glorious diversity—Nature creates what we haven’t imagined, gives us vital gifts we’d never even think to look for.”