The room was small and Spartan; bare concrete walls, a single metal table lit by an overhead bank of harsh, white lights, and a wheeled metal table bearing three motorized surgical tools, clean and painful-looking. Without knowing why, I had an impression of being underground-a dampness in the air, a sense of weight hanging over me.
Dawson leaped up onto the table and sat with legs spread and shoulders slumped, a creepy, human posture that looked bizarre and out of place on his Monk body. He began swinging his legs at the knees, and I could hear the tiny motors whirring.
“When your name popped up on the EC network, all I could think about was splattering your brain all over whatever wall was handy, doing some finger painting with your blood if the mood struck me. Now look at you. I’ll be honest with you, you piece of shit. I am not sure how to proceed.”
Straining and jerking, I wrenched my head around to look directly at Dawson. I tried to say something, and managed to open my mouth, but only managed to force a gurgling sound out, my mouth filling with saliva.
“What’s that?” Dawson said, jumping up and leaning toward me, a hand cupped to his latex ear. “I can access huge translation libraries in seconds, but you don’t seem to be speaking any known human language.” He walked toward me with quick, mincing steps. “But then, as a piece of shit, you’re not human, are you?”
He punctuated this with a sudden backhand blow, so fast it was like a violent nervous tic had seized me.
“So I figure I’ll beat the shit out of you until you loosen up.”
I stared down at the floor as blood dripped from my broken lip and drooled into a puddle below me. My shivering was slowing and subsiding, being replaced joint by joint with a deep, cold ache. I could feel the hard lump of my gun pressing into my back, but I knew that in my present condition I wouldn’t be able to beat Dawson to the draw. Besides, I thought with a weak ripple of tired humor, maybe a good beating would loosen me up.
His hands were on me, then, and everything tilted as the fucking cyborg lifted me up out of the skid and held me up in the air. Sweat and blood and spit dripped down onto Dawson’s white Monk face.
“I am perfect, Mr. Cates. You perfected me. I don’t even need my badge anymore. I walk down the street, you fucking rats scatter. I go hunting at night. Word’s getting around, and all the rats hide underground, now, because they know Barnaby Dawson’s coming.” He cocked his head at me in a familiar birdlike gesture as I hung on his arms like a piece of slaughtered meat. “And I enjoy it, Mr. Cates. But I have a job to do, you know. I am not completely without programming. You’re the last thing on my to-do list, and then it’s a few centuries of enjoying myself.” He looked around, a disturbingly human movement. “Now, what are we doing here, I wonder? Ever since I became Barnaby Dawson Mark Two, Mr. Cates, I have been seeking you out. I have been tracing you with every resource at my discretion. Church feeds, old SSF contacts, good old-fashioned torturing of the rats. I’ve been able to piece together all your movements, and only now does it dawn on me what you’re here to do. You’re going after Squalor, aren’t you?” He laughed, an unnatural sound that didn’t resemble real laughter in any way. “Tell me one thing: Did you really think a rat like you was going to pull this off? That you had the capability?”
I felt his arms tense, and closed my eyes as he heaved me through the air. I slammed into the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth in my mouth, all the air knocked out of me, and I slid to the floor choking, my eyes bugging out of my head.
“I know what you’re wondering,” Dawson went on, walking toward me. “You’re wondering how in the world this fucking brilliant plan of yours went wrong. How come I wasn’t killed by those fucking Monks? The answer is, I’m a prototype. The first step. Bad luck for you. Bad luck,” he stooped, lifting me up again without any apparent effort, “for all the rats.”
He tossed me back onto the floor casually, my head cracking against the concrete, my vision blinking out in a purple flash and then coming back again. Head ringing, I writhed for a second or two and then realized I was, in fact, writhing. I started to crawl away from Barnaby Dawson, my own personal angel of death.
“You’re recovering,” he said behind me, and fuck me if he didn’t sound almost cheerful despite the digital sameness of his voice. “That’s good. I want all your slow wetware synapses online so I can be sure you really feel it when I reach down your fucking rat throat and pull your spine up through your mouth.”
As I crawled, I managed a deep shuddering breath, my ribs cracking with the sudden expansion, and I found, bleeding and crisped at the edges, my voice. “Fuck you,” I grated out, like coughing up razor blades.
Dawson tried to laugh. I got the impression laughter wasn’t programmed into his interface, so what came out was a harsh, strangled sound, a burst of static pushed through the humanizing filters. I ignored it, and kept crawling, feeling parts of me come back to life bit by bit. One thing hadn’t changed about Dawson. He was still a fucking System Pig at heart. It was the only advantage I had, and kept him talking. I raised my eyes from the floor and oriented on the surgery table. I needed to stand up, get my bearings, and for that I was going to need time.
“Fucking Pigs,” I panted. “You were going to kill me.”
There was no immediate response, just a weird fluttering noise, and then Dawson landed directly in front of me, one heavy boot slamming down on my outstretched hand. Not hard enough to break it, somehow. Just hard enough to hurt-the pain seared through my arm and smacked into me, I shuddered helplessly, mouth open, nothing coming out.
“We were going to kill you? Of course we were going to kill you. That’s our fucking job-thinning the herd. If we just let you pieces of shit breed, you’ll become a problem. Are you suggesting I should not do my job?”
The pain, terrible as it was, did not quite compare to the excruciating torment I’d experienced for the past hour or so, lying dead in an electronic coffin. I decided on a different tactic, and slumped, pretending to pass out. There was a chance this would gain me a bullet to the back of the head, but I didn’t think so. Dawson was enjoying himself too much.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said brightly, and the pain suddenly lessened in my hand as I was lifted up and tossed onto the surgery table as if I weighed nothing. The table rattled slightly, but held fast, and I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a little scream as my body hit the solid metal, my arms coming up to shield my face instinctively.
“Better,” Dawson said. “I want to enjoy this, and to do that I need you awake. Don’t pass out again, or I start tearing out your teeth.”
I writhed and moaned, which took very little acting, and snatched a quick glance around the room. Two exits, small, square room. I closed my eyes for a second and pictured the little map of the EC complex. I picked out the room I had to be in, and which door I wanted to get through. I rolled my head back and spotted Dawson, admiring his reflection in the polished metal of one of the doors. No doubt keeping one thought on me, but he was still human inside. Without a mod chip funneling every crazy thought into standard Monk reactions, he was slow and cluttered just like the rest of us.
I took a slow, deep breath, the air slicing my lungs, and clenched my fists hard enough to crack the knuckles. I closed my eyes as I exhaled, and pictured, for a moment, a beach. White sand, almost gray water with white foamy flecks, a blue, crystalline sky. I couldn’t remember when or where I’d seen it-when I’d been a kid? a picture on a Vid? — but it was there, in my head. I recreated it carefully, the quiet sound of waves and wind, the lonely sound of some kind of bird calling in the distance. I concentrated on it, felt my thoughts screw down to a pinpoint, focused on where the gun was. Where Dawson was. If Dawson had hydraulic joints and CPU-aided aim on his side, I had desperation, terror, and pain on mine.