She looked up the altimeter. Just a few metres to go. When she looked down, she saw that the hand was crawling towards her using its fingers. She kicked out but the hand snagged the toe of her shoe and swung there. It was heavy.
The shape crawled up her leg. She could feel the thousands of tiny hooks that gave it grip on her trousers. The revulsion, however, had passed. She understood—not in the explicit, verbal way that she communicated with Ego, but just as certainly—that Cory’s smart matter intended to crawl over her shoulder, down her arm, and take its place at the site of her amputation as a new hand. There it would bind with exposed nerve ends. Faithful as a crow on Odin’s shoulder. Or a dog at the throne of an empress. These metaphors were not hers. They formed part of the intuition that the smart matter used to interface with the will of its host. It wanted her.
Saskia considered. No longer would she be unbalanced when she ran. The stares of strangers would move elsewhere; she could once more walk the street in anonymity. Yet there were folded papers in the map pocket of her hiking trousers. One was the photocopied topsheet of an Emergency Room report filed in 1994 on a John Doe.
She waited for the hand to reach her groin. The muscles fluttered there. She withdrew the taser from her jacket and placed both terminals on the black surface of the hand and pressed the trigger. There was a burst of light and a click no louder than the collision of two billiard balls. The smart matter poured to the floor like a Slinky.
A final metaphor appeared in her mind: a noble bird in flight that is winged by a shot and pinwheels to the ground.
The smart matter had transformed into a white, luminescent cube. Saskia knelt and thumbed the pulsing light on its side. A dialogue tile appeared, reading, ‘Are you sure?’ She touched ‘Yes’ and the cube dulled. She skipped from the lift and elbowed the panel. The doors closed.
Three, two, one, said Ego. Go.
Richard Cory’s white hair guttered in the night wind. The cold hurt his ears but did not mute the electromagnetic traffic that blared from the antenna array. He was studying the horizon, where the grounded galaxy of city lights flattened. He looked down into the depths of air. Even the globe that housed the observation deck seemed far away. He felt the buzz of his caesium clock, tutting away the time, regret by regret. Nowadays, tiredness did not leave him until the smallest hours. An hour like this. Three hours beyond midnight. What form would the fourth hour take? Did it exist, just as, somewhere, little Lisandro still ran through the alleys of Buenos Aires and Star Dust flew?
‘Cory,’ a woman called.
Saskia Brandt was standing in the black rectangle that led to the hub. Thirty feet of curved gantry separated them. Her dark clothes made her face seem pale and those sad eyes drew out the memory of a story once told to him over tea in Shanghai: the legend of the panda, whose eyelids, once white, had blackened in mourning for a lost princess.
‘Saskia,’ he said, watching her approach. ‘I’m glad you came.’
She struggled as the wind tipped her this way and that. Her hair was longer than before. It flapped to a buzz and Cory liked how she aimed her face against the gusts. Here a glimpse of her strength. There a flash of her beauty. He remembered the curve of her uncovered breast and considered making her body his hearty meal. But no. Those travellers in postwar Buenos Aires: how they had blinked to one another, predator to predator, across bars and railway platforms. He imagined himself and Saskia as passengers on the windy deck of some old sailboat bound for the New World—when it was new.
Of all the people I have met, he wanted to say, I regret meeting you the least.
He watched her pull a folder from a long pocket on her thigh. She slid it across the five remaining feet between them. Cory stopped it with his foot.
‘I wanted to make sure,’ she called. ‘Open the folder.’
‘Why don’t you come closer? I’ll establish a wireless link through the interference, then we won’t need to shout.’
She did not smile. Fair enough, he thought. It was a poor joke to begin with.
‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’d rather keep my muscles under my own control.’
This connected too closely to the train of his thoughts. He looked at the plastic folder beneath his foot, page corners ruffling in the wind.
‘You still believe that’s possible?’
‘I’m here to help. It’s a choice I made.’
‘It’s a paradox. Acquiesce to it.’ His frustration rose like bile and he turned away, near to tears. ‘Sleep.’
‘One day. Not today.’
Cory looked at her. What was that in her voice? Triumph? But her expression was blank. Perhaps that computer of hers—Ego—was regulating her physiognomy. How he missed the contact of his smart matter. It had been left behind, however, as a token of his determination that he, Cory, should end here. There could be no rescue. He wondered whether Saskia had adopted the substance and saw that her left arm was hanging freely.
No new hand.
She passed the test. Good for her.
‘I can’t help but notice the bulge in your jacket,’ he said. ‘An electrical firearm?’
‘It can disable your ichor long enough for death to be irreversible.’
‘Very thorough, you Germans.’
She looked away, over the millions of lights, then turned back. Her expression was fierce.
‘Read.’
With a sardonic smile, he crouched for the folder and opened it. There were three clippings to read in the carnival light. From Shanghai, Santiago, and Louisville. His smile waned. Three anonymous Emergency Room reports. Each a twist on the last. Each undid his sanity one turn. Finally, when he had gulped the information away, reading each word in parallel, the spy understood the bitter medicine that was knowing. He understood why Jackson, his predecessor, had been driven so deeply into insanity. The workings of Jackson’s mind had gummed with the minutiae of the knowledge of things to come. The knowledge had been too detailed. The resolution had been too high.
Lisandro: his heart fluttering against the knife.
Cory’s knife.
Zoom out, Jennifer had said. Zoom out.
He gaped at Saskia, raging, but saw an answering stillness in her posture. And there was a true compassion in her expression. Yes, thought Cory, how different are we two? Each a bastard of the immiscible: machine and human.
‘So this,’ he said, striking the rail. ‘This–’
‘It’s the ichor. Think of the way my own device created the reality of the thornwood to protect me. The ichor repairs you after each—each–’
‘Say it. Suicide.’
‘Yes. Then it expunges the memory of the event.’
His next words came in a waiclass="underline" ‘Why didn’t it expunge the desire to repeat it?’
‘On every occasion, Cory, your body vanished before an autopsy could be performed. Look at the Louisville report from 1994.’
He frowned. She had not answered his question. There was something else. Something else to know. Did he have space inside? Wasn’t he already overloaded with what it meant to be himself? Desperately, he riffled through the papers. Their edges flapped like dragonfly wings, like his thin, aged hair. He read the four pages in four blinks. ‘A pistol shot through the roof of the mouth. Body discovered by a jogger. He… I took a few hours to die.’ He swallowed. ‘Why is this one significant?’
‘They performed a CT scan. Look at the volumetrics.’
As he did, a new horror rose within him. This sensation had a physical corollary: vomit. He coughed it over the rail and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘No. That’s impossible. That I refuse.’