Explosive self-sealing. I wonder what the zoning permits look like for that.
I don’t wonder for long, though. One of New York’s yellow cabs drops from a nest of tangled steel, bounces, rolls down a forty-degree chunk of burning asphalt, and flicks me off the bridge like a gnat.
Will there be an afterlife, I wonder? Choirs of angels? Or a fiery pit? One unlearns these falsehoods over time, but the child who learnt to fear hell is never really gone. To tell the truth, I think I’ve had quite enough of afterlives as it is—this one has been pretty purgatorial.
Almost fifty years floating in supercooled jelly like some medical specimen, thoughts creeping like rats through the cramped silicon corridors of machines, trapped behind video screens and camera systems. Never sleeping, never resting, never ceasing to think about the world you no longer belong to.
No, if this is a taste of the afterlife, I think oblivion will do nicely.
—Unencrypted signal fragment intercepted at 0450 24/08/2010
37.7 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile)
local source (Manhattan)
No Positive ID.
Erection
Viral. That’s the way Prophet put it.
I don’t know how to put it any better. I can feel it in me now, I can feel it in us: seeking out the old code, shaking its hand, seizing control and changing its mind. Spreading the good news, particle by microscopic particle. It’s changing me from the inside out: the Tunguska Iteration.
The good plague.
Maybe just a dream. I mean really, even with Cephtech, what are the odds that you can feel the reprogramming of individual cells? How is that even possible? Imagination, more likely, fueled by False Prophet murmuring at the back of my head that Nanocatalyst viability assessment is complete and the iteration is ready to deploy.
All I know is, the feeling fades as I rise from the darkness. I hear other voices, here at the bottom of the river. They’re not loud, but they’re distinct. I can hear them clearly over the hissing of my respirator.
“You were CIA all along? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Gould again. I swear, that fucker’s got to be my own personal spirit animal.
“Give me a fucking break.” Tara Strickland’s down here, too.
Pale daylight filters down through the muddy water. Another glorious Manhattan morning has begun.
“You want to help, help me find this guy,” Strickland says. “You’re so sure he’s the key to all this.”
“The suit is. Alcatraz and the suit, together. That’s the weapon.”
Ah, Nathan. So near, and yet so far. Would you talk about you and your right arm? Would you talk about Tara Strickland and her spinal cord?
“Uh-huh. Chino—anything?”
“Nothing, ma’am. Sweep complete. We’re working our way back along the shore.”
Chino. Dude. Good to hear your voice.
I roll over. The riverbed slopes upward, bare gray rock, current-scoured.
“I don’t think we—”
“There! That’s his signal!”
“We got him, Chino. Back to the vehicles.”
“Over here! This way! Over here!”
I crawl across the waterline. Gould and Strickland wave down at me from the edge of a torn-up underpass, fissured and buckled. Grids of rebar show through the gaps like sutures. The Queensboro bridge is a tangle of broken Tinkertoy at my back. Behind it, on the far shore, Roosevelt Island smolders like Pompeii after the fireworks.
So much for getting my life back. So much for rising from the dead. Help me, Obi-Wan Hargreave; you were my only hope.
You fucker.
Strickland’s already ringing up the chain of command by the time I jump up to rejoin the home team: Lieutenant Tara Strickland, seconded, special ops. Announcing the Return of the Prodigal Daughter, sir. Would like to go partying with the Ceph at their Central Park HQ. Wanna come?
Colonel Barclay is unconvinced. Much talk of foolish heroics and pointless suicide. Strickland counters by saying that Gould has convinced her we have a real shot at turning this thing around (I couldn’t swear that that was the best approach to take, but at least Barclay doesn’t turn her down flat). Strickland asks for air support; Barclay says he’ll get back to her.
Strickland doesn’t wait for that. We move out.
Gould tries to fill me in on the way. It’s not the smoothest narrative I’ve ever heard, punctuated as it is by uhhs and umms and Get down get down fucking Squids at nine o’clock!s. But it turns out the N2’s been tightcasting more than basic vitals and GPS coordinates. It’s been reading the voxels in my visual cortex. Or no, that’s not right: It’s been feeding the voxels in my visual cortex, lighting them up like LEDs on a flatscreen display, and that’s just as true for Prophet’s memories as it is for waypoints and weapons specs. And it’s been writing it all to the thirty-gigahertz band as well.
Nathan Gould has been spying on my dreams.
Prophet’s memories have told him more than they’ve told me. They’ve told him that the center of Ceph operations is under the Central Park Reservoir. Isn’t THAT a coincidence I think, and then: Hargreave. Hargreave and his corporations within corporations, their tentacles squirming down through the boardrooms and the back rooms and the generations, the butterfly flaps its wings in 1912 and a hundred years later neither crime nor depression nor all the developers in the world have managed to make a dent in that sacred green space.
What was it Hargreave said to Gould, just before the ceiling crashed in? “You think I’m based in this cesspit city because I like it here?”
Think about it, Roger. Think about how old New York is. The Europeans showed up what, five centuries ago? The Amerinds, thousand of years before that. All that time the Ceph have been sleeping under our streets and none of us even knew it. Almost none of us, at least; down through all those ages I bet at least one or two people must’ve wandered into the wrong cave at the right time, tiptoed among all those sleeping giants, maybe made off with a box of Kleenex or a bedside alarm clock or a fountain of youth.
Hargreave was an adult in 1908. I wonder how old he was then. I wonder if Tunguska was really the first time he stole fire from the gods. I’m thinking, what if Hargreave was around back when New York started clearing the squatters out of central Manhattan? What if Hargreave was there in the fifteen-fucking-hundreds, playing his backroom games to make sure that someday the biggest city on the whole damn continent would be sitting on the roof of the Devil’s summer cottage?
I have no idea why, Roger. It’s all just idle speculation bouncing around in the back of a Bulldog on its way to the final showdown. All I’m saying is, maybe Tunguska wasn’t the first time Hargreave got in and got out, and maybe Ling Shan wasn’t the second. Maybe Ling Shan was just the first time the owners woke up and found him in their bedroom.
But like I say, I don’t really get much chance to follow up on any of this because the Ceph keep distracting me. I’ve never seen more than one dropship at a time before: Four of them do a low-altitude flyby over the water before we’re off East River Drive. I’m on the turret but I don’t even try to light them up: they’re going too fast, the ride’s too bumpy for a bead, and I gotta admit a part of me’s hoping that if we don’t draw attention to ourselves they might not notice us, just head off to wherever they’re going and let us get to Central Park in peace.