Virology E-Book

Ren Warom

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 480

Beschreibung

It's been four weeks since Shock Pao broke open the virtual world of the Slip. With the stolen bio-ware Emblem in his head, he controls all the world's systems, and so the shadiest characters in Foon Gung are desperate to track him down. Shock and the Hornets are running out of places to hide. Meanwhile, the Patient Zeros' cryptic illness is worsening. The source of the disease points to the distant hubs; Earth's former cities snatched up and sent into orbit. With their pursuers nearing and time running out to find the cure, the Hornets flee skywards, from the insane underworld of Tokyo to the throngs of New York, all the time moving towards an evil that makes Hive Queens look like garden insects.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Zen Awakening

I Am a Mountain

Hunting Solo

The View From Heaven

The Aftermath Always Sucks

Zero Dark Thirty

Hu Hai Abandoned

Home Again, Home Again…

Hostile Takeover

Zero Tolerance

A Killer Can Look Upon a Queen

Hu Hai in Hunin

What KJ Did…

Shandong in Flames

The Place of Dead Roads

Disconnect

Zero Hour

How Not to Steal a Shuttle

Part Two

The Stars My Destination

The Unholy Trinity

Last Tango in Paris

Aunty Dong Disappointed

Tokyo Drift

As Above

Zen Tangle

So Below

A Resignation by Proxy

Don’t Upset Your Aunty

Little Solarium of Horrors

Less Than Zero

Shanghai Blues

Audience

Life’s a Circus’ Pal

In a New York Minute…

The Shape of Things to Come

Deuces are Wild

Zero Sum Game

The View From Here

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ALSO BY REN WAROMAND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Escapology

TITAN BOOKS

virology

Print edition ISBN: 9781785650949E-book edition ISBN: 9781785650956

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: June 20171 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Ren Warom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2017 Ren Warom

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website:

www.titanbooks.com

For my three stooges AKA the spawn.

If I could have kids all over again, I’d choose you everydamn time, no matter what I might say about swappingyou for hamsters…

PART ONE

Zen Awakening

Zen strides the city of Foon Gung with her Queens, laughing. Her Queens are finally free, permanently unleashed from their virtual prison, the Slip. They will have their fun and then come for her, bring her down to them. Until then, she rides within them, dreaming all they see. Being all they are. Immense. Goddess-like. The ground so far below it’s nothing more than a game of the world in miniature.

Clouds brush past. Drones buzz in her ears. Screams drift up as laser fire lays waste to the inner city; all those ’scrapers in too-close proximity, helpless to defend themselves or the thousands caged within them. All those fragile lives. For a moment, she’s the very sky falling upon them. And then it all goes wrong.

The Haunt and his Hornet swarm. His pirates.

They ruin everything.

Somehow the Haunt pulls a Kraken from the depths of Slip. Some lost or abandoned avatar, a thing of hungry coils. This thing, this hideous id best left in Slip to rot, is set loose on the nodal-Queen. High-pitched, her cries echo across the Gung, calling the others, who come running, and Zen comes with them.

She revels in the destruction of the Kraken, urges them after the Haunt, to tear him to shreds in the same fashion. To stop him.

They get to his second avatar first. His Shark. Desperately trying to get back to him. She screams at them to destroy it. Destroy him. Claps her hands as they snap that connection, injuring him as she was injured. And she’s laughing again as she urges them to rend into his mind, dig a hole deep enough for all six Queens to cocoon within. Use him as he used the Kraken.

As his mind begins to cave, she longs to be there, to take part. To feel him break apart in her hands. Unexpected then, the sudden snap. Pain unimaginable. Enough to wake her. Wide-eyed and gasping.

Awake for the first time in… how long?

She didn’t know she could wake.

But the Queens are gone. Her connection to them, though minimal since Josef’s accomplice, the J-Hack, Breaker, replaced her proper link to her Queen with the link to Polar Bear—the intruder-avi, her jailer—is gone. Nothing but silence where once the talk of the Queens lulled her in her dreams.

Cut off and denied, awake, she stares out into endless white, desperate to close her eyes.

She wants to sleep again.

Anything but being back in this two-fold prison—her sphere and within in the warm sleeping womb of Polar Bear, who was never hers, never meant to be hers, whose presence is punishment. Cruelty. Bear is still sleeping, of course she is. Bear will always sleep. Once that meant that Zen would always sleep too. Now she has no idea what it means.

Zen will never escape her though. Not without help.

And Bear is not all there is. There is the orb, the glass that contains them both, floating in this sea of white. Glass should be breakable but she imagines this glass is far from it, and she has no idea where this white space is, only that is it formless and so warm it crackles with static. How long has she been here? It might be over a decade. Longer. She should be in pain, should be starving. Broken inside. But Josef couldn’t see her hurt no matter how much she hurt him. And she did, didn’t she? She enjoyed it too.

She’s a little disappointed in him. Punishments should hurt. His did.

Zen and the Queens made sure of that.

Josef. Thinking of him, she remembers what happened in the tower before her Queens walked the Gung. Did he die when her Queens stepped through his eyes? Oh she hopes he died, long and slow. He betrayed her. Betrayed her Queens. Helped Breaker diminish her… Zenada screams as if some dam has broken, surprised to hear her voice. She remembers. Her Queens. The Haunt. He stole her Queens. He stole her key.

She stares with burning eyes through the golden shape of Polar Bear and the glass of the sphere. Smooth. Impenetrable. Inescapable.

She’s helpless and not helpless. The Haunt isn’t the only one with bio-ware in his head. Though hers, admittedly, is far from the sophistication of Emblem, which once kept the Queens locked in Slip, she’s had longer to learn it, to make it work with her. For a long time, it was all she had left of real awareness, her only connection to life.

She’s been experimenting with it in her dreams. Using it to travel Slip, attaching new protocols to scraps of code, forcing them to erupt to change. To evolve. Reaching out to put her mark on the real world through the medium of the virtual, the Slip, her Slip, and the results are already out there, written on the flesh of Zeros. Trapping them within their bodies as she’s been trapped. Soon they’ll be more code than person. Drivable.

There’s a game here. A way to have them bring something to her. Someone. Someone who can unlock her prison. A key in human form. A Haunt remade to a key.

Long used to patience, to dreaming, Zenada dreams of all that might be possible when she has what he has. Of ways to make the world pay for all she’s had taken from her.

Of punishment. Richly deserved, and dealt with absolute pleasure.

I Am A Mountain

At the rear of Foon Gung’s seven-hundred-mile sprawl, Shandong’s mountain ranges rise from the mist, crooked and vast. Around them, abrupt and impatient, juts an array of interlocked high-rises, reflecting mountains, mist and sparse greenery back at itself from every window, turning mountains into a maze, a confusion. These ranges span miles, interweaving concrete and stone right out to the sea where occupied bridges—intricate as cobwebs—connect the mountain habitations to broken spars and ranges too treacherous to live on, all surrounded by furious ocean.

On clear days the sight of spars retreating into the sea, a terracotta army shrunken with age, is both beautiful and sad. A reminder of what the world lost.

On an outcrop above a rolling expanse of restless mist sits a lone figure built from golden code bright as fireflies and scintillating in the rise of sunlight: Shock Pao.

Once a Haunt, a hacker able to pass unseen, signal-less in Slip and IRL, he’s now fugitive and stranger than human. Around him a temple forms, built in gradual increments from a delicate swirl of gold, chain-like filaments. A perfect facsimile from its tiered and sway-backed roof to the rows of prayer lanterns jostling in the breeze. Inside, thick banks of incense give off sickled drifts of golden smoke, floating away to particulate embers of code. Before them the restless ghosts of monks stand bowed and chanting, their voices a murmur on the breeze, low enough to enter the skin like warmth, in tingling vibrations.

Across the floors, around the pillars, avatars bloom into being, roving in curious bursts about the walls. After he freed them from Slip so his friends could trap the Queens in Core, the dark centre of their Hive, the avatars have grown bold, exerting their independence. Why would they not? The lock is gone; the gates open. They have a choice now, and they choose, in general, to leave. To play. To make up for a lifetime of being locked in. There are people who can’t understand that. After all, the Slip is an ocean so vast it defies measurement. But is anywhere really big enough when you know you can’t leave?

A shoal of fish darts between lanterns, briefly flaring bright and shade under golden flames. Shock touches them and feels somewhere far away the shape of the mind attached. Masculine. Reclined in a leather chair. Faint scents of whiskey and musky aftershave. Eyelids twitching. By the lazy swirl of his thoughts he imagines himself dreaming. Dreaming in Slip. Cute. Also impossible, considering Slip is pretty much already a dream. Real but not at all real. Shock smiles to himself, wondering what this man would do if he knew this temple was just an illusion of an illusion. A dream about dreaming.

This is where Shock hides. In this place. In moments like this. To escape from everything, even when he shouldn’t be, because there are days that imprint into your psyche, that make or break you, but always change you and, until four weeks ago, Shock thought that was the worst a day could do. He’d give a lot to still be that fucking ignorant. Four weeks ago he went through twenty-four hours that dismantled him. Tore him apart cell by cell and remade him. Literally. What he is now is not quite human, not quite together, a mishmash of aching scars, bio-ware and brokenness walking around in a human skin trying to look normal and feeling whole fucking universes away from it.

Long-ass story of that twenty-four hours in short form? He kind of broke the world.

Short story long? Where to begin? Foon Gung, the last land left on earth not leering out of the sea at an awkward angle, the only bit that survived when they physically broke the world a few hundred years back—on purpose as it happens—used to be run by the Corporation known as Fulcrum, created and run by the Lakatos family. Why did Fulcrum run the Gung? Simple influential and financial weight. They owned the Slip, the virtual world that everyone everywhere uses—jacking in to ride inside golden avatars in the shape of ocean creatures that until four weeks ago he thought were more thing than person. Turns out he was wrong there too. Avatars are made from you. They’re alive. Real. Beings.

Which is kinda why he had that twenty-four hours to begin with.

Slip was run by the Hive Queens, giant AI avatars created by Fulcrum to manage the vast amounts of data created by billions of service users. The Queens were ants. Giant. Fucking. Ants. Why ants in a Hive? Why a Hive at all when Slip is a virtual ocean? Who the hell knows? Fact is, not only were these Queens ants, they were fucking lunatic. Wanted to bust out IRL and take shit over, Old Testament style—that whole giants walking the earth shit. Only thing keeping them in? Emblem, a tiny shred of bio-ware, the lock and key between Slip and RL, hidden away in Core at the centre of the Queens’ Hive, the only place they couldn’t go.

Now Emblem’s in his head, so meshed with his brain he can’t tell where it ends and he begins. Yeah, long-ass story.

Suffice it to say that in twenty-four short hours, he pulled off the most extraordinary heist in hacking history—because, yeah, no fucker’s ever got far enough to jack Hive, let alone Core—got hijacked by said bio-ware, chased by gangsters, caught and tortured, rescued, chased again, electrocuted by a psychopath, killed her and her crazy brother, jacked every avatar out of Slip, got head-jacked by the Queens and had his second avatar, Shark, torn away from him. That’s like losing a piece of yourself and FYI Shock knows that shit inside out too, having lost several fingertips when he was tortured.

His fingers tingle at the memory and he lifts his hand, staring at biotech tips, functional instead of familiar. Gold at the moment, they’re silver against the soft tan shade of the flesh they cap IRL. As it happens, you can replace fingertips and teeth, but you can’t kill the memory of loss. You can’t mend invisible damage.

The only reason he’s still here wasting air is because, in all the chaos and cruelty of that day, life chose to send him a break or two. His friends. Amiga, a Cleaner sent to kill him who instead decided to save his stupid wreck of a life; the Hornets, a J-Hack crew of super-smart and sassy drop-outs; and the people of the Resurrection, a floating city of pirates, scientists, lunatics and damn good folk, who put their lives on the line to help save his so he could save the Gung. He’s not sure he did that. In fact he’s certain he didn’t.

By the end of that twenty-four hours everything he knew about the world and his place in it was re-written. But it didn’t end there. If fucking only.

Without Fulcrum, the Gung, too big, too messy, too full of people and now too scarred, littered with the fallout of one day of unmitigated disaster, is vulnerable to Corp takeover. Right this moment the big names are slugging it out for control, like Kaiju smashing each other senseless with whole buildings ripped from their foundations. And the people of the Gung, forced to see the lie their lives have been, are slowly boiling to agitation. They won’t stand by and watch the power struggle for long. They’re itching to join in, and fuck knows what happens then.

The only thing he knows for sure is what happened to everyone who fought with him that day.

Captained by Cassius Angel, a scar-patterned sprawl of a man with few foibles and a hot temperament, and carrying Volk, the Pharm whose drug locked the Queens in Core, and Petrie, the man-mountain bosun who led a rabble of well-armed pirates to save Shock’s ass, the land ship Resurrection City took her people back out to sea, to the ruins and remains of North America—tilted land masses forming vast valleys around white water estuaries. They’ve dropped anchor by the remains of Louisiana, a vertical swampland of vast twisted oak, cyprus, banyan and water tupelo crawling with fifty-foot long alligators, to fix their ship, half destroyed by battle on the way to aid his sorry ass. He pops in to check on them every now and then, trying and failing not to freak them out with this new avi-form of his, but mostly he just misses them.

As for himself and the Hornets, he kind of (totally did) fuck things badly. Call it grief, call it stupidity, whatever you fucking want, but he forgot to shield them from the outcome of what they’d all done that day. Apparently shit like removing crime lord threats and freeing the Gung’s citizens from Fulcrum’s control is illegal even when it saves people’s fucking lives. And apparently, even with Emblem being unpredictable as hell, he’s still considered a primary asset by… oh… just about everyone anywhere who equates controlling Slip with power, which is kinda everyone.

Not long after the dust settled, all eyes turned on them. No matter that Shock scrambled at that point to scrub them from the Slip, from any memory anywhere, he was still too slow.

Which is why they’re hiding. And hunting.

He should be in Slip helping them right now, trawling the messy, cluttered streets of the Gung for the biggest threat currently on their tails: the Grey Cartel. Before Fulcrum fell, the Cartel was barely repped on the Gung, a few dozen lower-tier dealers here and there, no biggie. In the wake of Fulcrum’s fall, the Cartel have come from out of nowhere in droves. Sneaky bastards that they are, they’ve been ignoring Slip to comb the Gung district by district. So diligently in fact, that it’s a mere matter of time before they realize he and the Hornets are in Shandong and attack full force.

So why is he procrastinating? Why is he here, building a dream, an illusion of escape from everything he has no right to hide from? Simplest answer? He’s scared.

When he lost Shark, the rage he shaped his second avi from didn’t go with it, and now it’s no longer Shark-shaped it’s no longer under his control. Boiling inside of him, black hurricanes fraught with lightning, leaving him afraid of what he might do. Of what he can do. Before Emblem, when he was a Haunt, signal-less, capable of hiding from anyone, he was still always on the run. He was very good at running away.

He’s running now, but the difference between then and now is that he’s stood and fought too. Fought and won. And once you know how to fight, once you know that you can, the urge can be hard to resist, and sometimes he just wants to let go. Be a shark. Be Shark. Sometimes he wants to tear the walls down just to hear them scream like he’s screaming. Feel like he’s feeling. At those moments, he has to stop. Breathe. Resist. Even when he doesn’t want to. Especially then. Especially now.

Closing his eyes, Shock allows the temple to dissipate like smoke and fills with shame, hot as liquid lead.

Sensible.

Wincing, he opens his eyes. Swirling before him in the air is Puss, his primary avatar, her direct gaze made alien by square pupils and too familiar by his connection with her.

Bathed in her censure, he falls back on old defences, saying sardonically, Aren’t you proud? I could have followed the impulse instead.

Proud? Of your meagre display of self-control? Maybe a little, something quantum, she says, equally sardonic. Back to work maybe? I think you’ve wasted enough time.

Fading away, Puss leaves one tentacle until last, gesturing imperiously. Yes ma’am.

Shock sighs. Steps through from mountainside to Slip, shaking off the wisps of temple still clinging to his shoulders. Slip’s a virtual ocean, but it no longer looks like one. Freed from Fulcrum’s control, higher level Techs and Corps with hacking skills have begun to tear down some of the corals once used to connect the world and are building in their place something strange. Wonderful. A little terrifying.

A little of everything—ragged portions of bizarre cities, rebellious of convention and physics, portions of landscape so surreal they could be other planets, zones akin to bubble universes with their own rules of physics. Castles in the air. Towers made of trees. Whatever can be imagined can be made here. Is being made. The sheer breathtaking invention of it astounds him. But it means the Slip is no longer so open. Things can hide here, and they do. They hide too well. Maybe even from eyes as sharp as his.

Puss is nowhere to be seen, already off again trying to keep a working map of Slip as it changes and evolves so Shock, reading her, can avoid getting lost.

Reaching out into the infrastructures connected to the Gung, Shock winces as the whole shape of it builds in his mind, a panorama of aching white noise, all those bodies and cars, too much information, the flash of monos, trailing conversation streams. Snippets of music, vid-stream, of arguments and laughter. The whole world in his head.

There’s no way to ignore it, instead he makes use of it, focusing on specific patterns. Tells. The rhythms he’s come to associate with the Cartel. In this fashion he manages to pick up traces of the unit he’d clocked near Risi before tapping out and needing a break. Faint. Very faint. But it seems they’ve headed in to Risi proper.

Shit. That’s where Amiga’s crew is hunting.

Used to be he came here and rode behind Puss’s eyes and had to swim everywhere he needed to go, utilizing data gulleys if he needed to move fast from one area of Slip to another. Now? He closes his eyes, thinks where he needs to go, opens them: and he’s there. Emblem makes Slip accessible in this way and he has no idea how it works yet, only that it does and that, yeah, it freaks him out. He shouldn’t be able to do this. No one should. Picking up the exact whereabouts of the Cartel unit in the data streams of Risi, all that RL interference resonating through Slip code madness—that’s not so easy. Reassuringly tough, in fact.

When he finds them, they’re on scooters, mere streets away from where Amiga, Deuce, Vivid and Raid are sat drinking coffee and arguing search routes. With little time for formalities, he does the single thing Amiga hates the most—considering how it reminds her of the erstwhile boss she killed by shooting rounds through her own lung—and IMs without chiming.

Heads up. Cartel about two minutes away, closing in fast.

You have got to be shitting me! She’s snarling. So not good. I’m guessing this means Puss gave you that verbal slapping you sorely deserved?

You sicced Puss on me? Oh wow, Amiga. Best friend ever. Bitch.

Oh fuck off. My goddamn Cleaner senses have been twitching all morning and now we’re what… seconds from imminent discovery, no thanks to you?

Ugh.

Yeah. Right. Sorry.

Just get back on them and give them a nudge away. Last thing we need is a fight here. Too many people around, as per fucking usual. Track me in on their direction so we can follow.

On it.

He leaves her be, assuming she’s going to tell the others, instead she throws in a toilet break excuse and goes off alone.

Amiga!

What?

You’re supposed to take your fucking team.

I did. Me, myself and I. Poke the unit toward one of those ’scrapers for me. She throws him a vivid mental picture. She’s ridiculous gifted at vis. He thinks maybe it was her specialism before she Failed, but wouldn’t ask. The “danger, here be dragons” sign over that portion of her life is writ large enough to be seen from Mars.

NO. Not until you call for back-up. He doesn’t tell her that he’d do pretty much anything to avoid nudging. Has no intention of letting her know how awful it feels to interfere with anyone’s right to think for themselves.

Shock. Do it.

Amiga has this thing she does, this quiet, cold thing that frankly makes his jaw ache. She does it on purpose. He hates it. Hates her when she does it. But he understands her need to be alone. It’s not like he’s a fucking social butterfly, even though he technically lives with over a hundred and twenty Hornets, he sees only five of them semi-regularly and only Amiga every day, if she’s around.

Shock. Drive them, or I will.

No point arguing. So Shock does what he hates to do and reaches in to the minds of the Cartel unit to plant presumed knowledge of the Hornets hiding in one of the nearby ’scrapers. They’re a strange design, these ones, and he can guess why she wants them there—all the better to corner them. It’s a good strategy. It’d be better if she had back-up.

Done.

Don’t call the others.

He sighs. Like I would. Be real, Amiga. Be fucking careful too.

I don’t need to be careful, she snaps, and then she’s gone, leaving aching silence.

Yeah, you do, he whispers to her absence. You just don’t want to.

All okay? Puss rolls out of Slip tentacles first, radiating calm in that way she has.

Nope. Why have we always got to seek the worst-case scenario?

Because you two are your own worst enemies.

Hah. Maybe.

Definitely. But chill. We won once, we’ll do it again, even if you two are still running solo like absolute idiots.

Feeling his honesty like a burden, he admits, It didn’t feel like winning.

Puss sends him the warm glow she uses as a smile. It rarely ever does, she says, soft and sad.

Shock reaches for his body, sat cross-legged on the edge of a balcony at their hideout in Shandong, far away from the chaos of Gung, still overcrowded but somehow remote. Peaceful. Pops out facing himself, staring at his own face, the ever-present warmth of Puss wrapping around his back. He looks in through his own eyes to see himself, golden, looking back at him. Smiles, and watches his selves, gold and technicolor, smiling at each other into infinity. This is what he is now on the inside. A paradox. An illusion. Nothing he understands.

Trying not to allow it to frighten him any more than it already has today, he reaches through those multi-selves to the connection he has with Deuce, and wholesale dumps the information Amiga demanded he keep to himself. Okay, so he promised he wouldn’t. He lied. If she can be stupid, he can lie, right?

The solemn promise of retribution doesn’t matter.

Some things are just worth the aggro.

Hunting Solo

Rotten fish stench grabs Amiga’s nostrils, shoving its way in beside the almighty reek of sweaty bodies and filthy walls. Talk about uninvited visitors. Ramming the back of her hand to her nose she hunkers down, hoping stench may resemble smoke and remain high, but if anything it’s stronger, pulling hot bubbles of acid gorge to rise and pop in her throat. And now the thigh she took a bullet through saving Shock is having a bitch fit, despite all the work Ravi, the Hornets’ sawbones, has put in trying to fix it like new.

Her fault for pushing too hard, but rest is boring. Inactivity is the only thing more certain to kill her than a bullet.

“Holy honking hell, Batman, someone needs to throw their goddamn trash in a furnace,” she mutters, oblivious to memories of her own overflowing bin habits. Hers never stank this bad. “They need to throw this whole goddamn place in a fucking furnace.”

Having lived in the sweaty confines of the Gung her entire life, Amiga’s seen some shit holes for sure, but all fifty floors of this ’scraper’s narrow, poorly lit, grime-streaked concrete corridors resemble nothing less than a circle of hell. Turning the corner at the end of the corridor, she finds another stairwell leading up into darkness and runs lightly up, scaring off a couple of roosting pigeons. Amiga shushes them impatiently. If she had a gun she’d shoot them. But she chucked it when she ran out of bullets.

Plastic 3D-printed gun. Useless after the magazine is empty.

Also less easy to come by every day, like everything is with the Corps up in arms and the Gung spiralling to pieces, less sure of itself and more aggressive by the day. If things don’t change soon, or break, this place will go up in flames. Or explosions. Amiga kinda wants to be out of Dodge before then, wants her Hornets, her family of choice, out of Dodge. They’ve had enough of being caught in crossfire. But first there are rats to hunt. Cartel rats.

The stairs end at yet another long, dirty corridor. Of the caged bulbs above her head, about one in every five casts light in a sputtering cone, illuminating ranks of poor-quality steel doors, dented and fissured from who the hell knows what. It could be a prison, or an institution, but people live here. Until she left to start Tech, Amiga used to live in a similar place. Maybe a bit cleaner. Heck, a lot cleaner, but no less fucking miserable. Misery is a commodity for the Corps and criminals who build these pits.

Today their penny-pinching will work in her favour. This place has pretty much nowhere to hide. The inside comprises a spiral. Corridor leading to corridor leading to corridor until you hit the stairwell to the next floor. In other words: if there’s a fire, everyone dies.

Her targets, therefore, have to be somewhere ahead.

How many floors did this thing have again? Amiga checks back at her brief scan and offers up a silent curse at any listening entities when she realizes she’s barely more than a quarter of the way up. Her thighs are on fire. Stairs: literally the worst invention ever. Yet somehow the most irritatingly persistent.

The only good thing about these shitty ’rises, apart from the currently useful design, is that the people in them know violence well enough to avoid it. They’ll have heard the epic gun battle in the middle of their courtyard and gone on lockdown. Meaning she won’t accidentally kill someone.

A scrape in the hallway ahead snaps her eyes forward. She feels the grin before she realizes it’s grabbed her mouth. Oh crap. Shouldn’t be smiling. Shouldn’t be having fun, especially not in this epic vom-sauna of BO, fish and grime. This is scratching an itch, nothing more. A little hit to keep the urge in check, to hold back the flood.

Another, more discreet scrape, almost too faint to hear.

Amiga’s head flashes clear, cleansed by the lightning of adrenal rush. Palming her knife from her back pocket, she creeps forward to the corner and rises to stand— head pressed back into the wall regardless of dirt. In this heightened state of clarity she can hear the Cartel soldiers waiting close by. There’s anticipation in the hitch and rasp of their breath. They know she’s followed them. They were counting on it.

Fuck’s sake, Amiga mouths to the ceiling.

Why do people do it? Why? Knowing what she is? Amiga’s breath stops altogether for a moment. Was.

Knowing what she was, they shouldn’t think they can entrap her into chasing them and then dispatch her without effort because narrow corridors and outnumbered and stupid goddamn bringing a knife to a gun party. This shit is worse than the whole hail of bullets assumption. It’s downright insulting. Hurts her fucking professional pride to the core.

These absolute morons are going to learn first hand the very significant difference between a killer and a Cleaner up close and excruciatingly personal.

Flexing her hands, Amiga visualizes, tenses, and flits around the corner. Sure enough, all seven Grey Cartel members are ranged up the next corridor, guns high and ready to shoot. Not ready enough. They’ve barely clocked her presence when she’s right in the face of the first one, grabbing his arm to ram it behind his back, up and under, forcing him in front of her as the others turn to fire the dregs of their bullets.

“Good evening,” she says brightly into his sweat-soaked hair as he jerks against her, blooms of blood and flesh slamming out of his torso. “Today you’ll be playing the part of my human shield.”

It makes her laugh how they portray combat on film and in the stream-shows from the hubs, the sensual flow of choreographed moves, so slick and smooth you’d think the blood might clean itself off the floor in reverence. Reality works a little different. Violence is ugly. Breathless. Personal. Fists miss targets. Feet slip. The impact of walls and floor, of fists and feet on flesh is a shock to the system, each one sparkling like a constellation of stars. The body aches. Burns.

A knife cut is numb and sear. A bullet startling impact and then heaviness. There’s nothing reverential about any of it, apart from the stunning responsibility of taking a life. Cleaners understand this from the inside out. Use it to their advantage. Waste nothing. Execute eliminations with swift, brutal efficiency, the kind that leaves a great deal of mess. Incongruous then, the use of the term clean to describe what the Cleaner does. Never fails to amuse her. Nor does the assumption that facing a Cleaner will be like in the movies.

Facing a Cleaner is facing death, and people never fail to realize it until it’s too late.

Out of bullets and one man down, his torso a mess of minced meat and bone fragments, the Cartel remain in close ranks as if they think she can be intimidated. Cute. Stuffing the laughter down, because it’s not safe to laugh—laughter in this situation steals humanity, makes her a monster—Amiga palms her knife and allows them to make the first move, en masse, as if that will go in any way toward changing the outcome.

Five kills, one immobilize and capture. No darts, no bullets, no crossbow bolts. No fucking problem.

Spinning her knife sideways in her hand, she waits, relaxed over the balls of her feet, until they’re close enough that she can see the colour of their eyes in the dim light. The fear that sparks when she glides forward, smiling, knife flashing left and right to leave the first two in her wake, their guts steaming on filthy concrete, a third reeling back choking, his hand clamped to his throat as if that can stop the deluge.

“I need one of you alive,” she tells the remaining three, shadowing them as they step back, uncertain. “Draw straws, maybe?”

They break at that, the lights going out, swallowed whole by dull clouds of panic. Good. Panic steals adrenalin. Steals movement. Fight or flight would kick in any second now if she gave it a chance. So she doesn’t. Running forward on the balls of her feet she grabs the closest and spins him, pulling his back hard against her chest, cupping his chin with her free hand and yanking, feeling that snap, that vibration as shockwaves travel the spine, the sudden heaviness of an emptied body.

Chucking him to the side, she’s on the next before he can scream, her knife sliding between his ribs, holding him steady as she drives the blade in over and over until all resistance falls out of his stance. Amiga drops him at her feet. Steps over him. Job done. It shouldn’t feel this fucking good. She shouldn’t feel this alive. Killing like this when she was doing Twist Calhoun’s bidding was killing her, she knew it. So why is it the opposite is now true? What does that mean?

The last soldier stands staring at her. He looks like he wants to run and can’t. Flushed and sweating through his jacket, he makes a move like he’s going to back away into the corridor, his whole body wracked with tremors. She walks up to him slowly, daring him to try. Daring him to run. He freezes.

“You said you needed one alive,” he says, gulping hard. His hand jerks, pointing at the bodies of his friends. “They’re all dead. You can’t kill me. You need me.”

“That’s right,” she says, and smiles.

Flipping her knife so the heavy metal handle is outward, she cracks it across his head. Watches him collapse to the floor, in slow motion at first as the body fights the inevitable and then in a great rush and thump as it gives in. Amiga sheathes her blade, grabs out a few ties from her jacket and makes quick work of fixing his wrists tightly together behind his back. When she’s finished, one of the doors opens. A middle-aged man in nothing but canvas shorts stands there, his body shining with sweat. They’ve been watching. Of course they have.

“You leaving now?” he asks, no heat in it. He’s scared but he wants her to go and he’s letting her see that. Admirable. Must be one of the floor Uncles. In a place like this, each floor will have several designated Aunts and Uncles, making sure everyone’s looked out for as much as they can be in this level of appalling poverty.

Amiga nods, reassuring with a smile. “Yes. You can clean these up.”

“We have no furnace.”

She makes a face. “Don’t I know it,” she says tartly. “My nose filed for divorce fucking ages ago. I suggest you chuck them in the bins. Hell alone knows they couldn’t smell any bloody worse.”

Clamping her teeth against the pain in her torso, another scar she won’t let Ravi get rid of, she grasps her unconscious rat under his shoulders and wrestles him up. Swears at him for being so fucking heavy, and annoying, and worst of all utterly stupid as she makes her way out of the building, one awkward thumping drag down a staircase at a time, her brain already motoring at top speed, considering and rejecting some manner of explanation that might evade her friends’ fury.

The aggressive growl of caterbikes greets her as she hits the courtyard, and three weave around each other into the narrow space, coming to a halt in front of her. Deuce, Vivid and Raid. Her team. The team she unceremoniously dumped. All unrecognizable under avi-skins Deuce built to protect them from easy ID. Fuck. Shock dropped her in it. Bastard.

Bastard! She howls into his IM.

Sorry not sorry, comes the snark-tastic response.

You fucking will be, Haunt.

Whatever, Cleaner. Bring it.

Deuce yanks his helmet off, the skin’s image stuttering and collapsing into pixels. Revealing hair mussed and damp, a face livid and utterly edible, those black eyes of his snapping like piranha as if he can tear the truth out of her, or just tear her apart. He looks like he’s got one hell of a lot to say, until his gaze drops to the man drooping in her arms. Then he sighs, shifting his gaze up to the deepening black of night as if he can find answers there for whatever it is she’s done.

“Where are the others?”

“Probably in the bin by now.”

He groans. “Bin? Really?”

“They don’t have a furnace,” she says, by way of explanation. “You should smell it in there. My nose is traumatized.”

“And he’s alive, right?” asks Vivid, out of her helmet and looking, if anything, more furious than Deuce.

“You can take his pulse if you like.”

“What I’d like,” Vivid snaps back, “is for you to fucking toe the line once in a while. Seven to one? Really? We’re a team, Amiga. Team members don’t ditch team members and go off hunting their murder jollies all alone. Capiche?”

Oops. Italian. Vivid’s definitely more than just a little pissed. Raid just sits there emanating disapproval. Terrific. Just what the doctor ordered.

“I’m sorry, okay?”

Deuce shoots her this filthy glare and snaps, “Sure. Like that fixes everything.” He dips his chin. “He alive?”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s get out of here; whatever you did sparked some serious attention from local Sec. A literal squadron is on the way. I love how you channel your sneaky Cleaner skills to do this shit.”

His snark is thick enough to spread on toast. She figures to eat it like crow but sees he’s still not in the mood for apologies or explanations. None of them are. When will she learn? The more you push people away, the further they go, until they’re gone for good. She wishes to fuck she could just stop pushing. But somehow it’s all she ever does.

The View From Heaven

Braced at the brink of space, Shanghai Hub contains Shanghai as it was, like some divine hand reached beneath and scooped it up whole, resting it into a cradle built to rock gently on the edge of earth and space, domed in crystal-clear glass. Of course, that’s exactly how it happened, minus the divine hand, unless one considers Corps to be divine—it wouldn’t be far from the truth, not if one were thinking divinity in terms of arrogant, possessive gods, like those on Olympus.

All these hubs, these cities grazing eternity were lifted by Corps, not governments, and are, to this day, run by Corps. Still arrogant. Still possessive. Fiercely independent even before the fall of Fulcrum, the loss of power to the Gung. No one who lives on a hub could easily be persuaded to leave. It’s more than patriotism. It’s fealty. People have always left the Gung for the hubs, searching for a new life. A better one. For a life without Psych tests and suffocating Corp control, but the grass is rarely greener. It is still always only grass. Corps hold power everywhere. Here, it is her Corp that holds power.

Evelyn Tsai was born and raised here. She’s deeply bonded to this fragile, perfect city; a complicated, symbiotic blending of woman and stone. She runs her hard-won portion with a will that mocks anyone who tried to tell a twenty-one-year-old with no money, no prospects and too many psychological scars that all she would amount to could be found between her legs.

Evelyn grew up in Shanghai Hub’s Pínkùn Dìqū, one of thousands of poor kids with threadbare clothes, dirty faces and little or no education. Until she was thirteen, she didn’t even know school existed—she worked with her mother in the fish factory, scraping silver scales. She’d hold her hands up to the light to watch them glitter. Smear them up her arms and pretend that, somehow, they would transform her to a fish so she could swim away.

Slip and RL meshed together in her mind—a fantasy of freedom.

She’s never forgotten how it felt to be dirty. To smell. To be hungry enough to lick those scales from her fingers— feeling them prick her tongue, her cheeks. Feeling them lodge tight in her throat, making her cough. Those years of want are not behind her; they are carved into her organs and her bones. She will always be sickly. Physically weak. Her doctor is sworn to secrecy upon his life, the life of his family.

Show weakness and the world eats you alive in gaping, agonizing chunks.

But she doesn’t blame Shanghai for her beginnings. She loves it for making her fight, for forcing her to learn the strength hidden in her bones: Shanghai’s concrete and steel.

Night currently veils her city in the hub, drenching it in whorls of neon and blue bio-light, a galaxy of offices, freeways and nightclubs bright enough to shame the stars just beyond the glass. Through her office window, Evelyn takes in the sensual curve of the bund, the ornate crenellations of Jin Mao tower, the dense scatter of high-rises like the skeletons of great beasts, smoothed to silky whites and greys under hot sun and pounding rain— neither of which are real on a hub, only imitations created by atmospheric machines.

Evelyn shifts her gaze between the light-drenched cityscape and the view beyond the dome, where thousands of hubs glinting like stars graze the boundary of earth and endless nothing. All those cities of the earth, risen up and elevated higher than mountains. Raised to look down upon the jagged shoreline of the Gung as they sail overhead. Gods indeed.

Gods maybe, but not always all-powerful.

Only four weeks ago they were beholden to the Gung. To Fulcrum. For access to Slip, for the means to maintain their servers. For any service or tech Fulcrum already owned or bought up in brutal hostile takeovers the Tech industries of the hubs came to despise. But now the landscape of power has changed. Power is up for grabs. So very much power from such a tiny scrap of land.

Evelyn looks down, though the Gung is far away at this point of orbit. From this height, Earth is a curve of rippled cloud, courting green at the edge, a flash of aurora. Above it, the abyss is black and deep. Absolute. Filled with dead light. It makes her shiver. Shanghai’s cradle is fragile, the grip of tenuous gravity all that holds it from drifting into frozen oblivion. If anything went wrong… it only takes a moment to lose everything.

Evelyn knows this as deeply as she knows her city.

A throat clears behind her. “Madame Tsai, they’re conscious.”

Evelyn thanks her assistant with a nod and strides to the shoot as gracefully as any lady of class, except that she is not one and never was. It can be faked. Everything can be faked, because everyone is pretending. Everyone wears the same masks, paints the same illusions, even the rich—haute couture, exclusive resorts, single-access penthouse suites, private shuttles, cuisine and wine so rare only a fraction of a percent of the entire population of the hubs and the Gung can afford it. Wealth is an excellent disguise indeed, and Evelyn is almost rich enough to ease the clenching of terror in her gut.

Almost.

* * *

Her heels sound out hungry clicks as she steps on to the cool green of the lab floor. This level hums just under the surface; machines everywhere working with quiet efficiency. It’s her favourite part of the building. She had this colour, this ambience, recreated in the penthouse suite she calls home, at the top of one of Shanghai’s most exclusive residences, including the hum, a modulator over the air-con to ensure her sleep is serene.

Keel joins her as she crosses the corridor to the warren of interconnected, secured labs taking up the entire centre of this floor. His domain.

She offers him a soft, “Morning, Keel.”

“Ms Tsai.”

Keel, otherwise known as KeelHaul, is the epitome of the young HipXec. Dressed in three-quarter-length pants, a button-down shirt, braces and wingtips, with long auburn hair piled into a bun, his incurious green eyes avoid her gaze from behind handcrafted wooden glasses. Keel’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum, utterly brilliant, an ex-Fail who once worked as a Pharm, a drug developer, for criminals. He’s Evelyn’s ace card.

Especially today.

Since the fall of Fulcrum, Evelyn’s been working hard to negotiate partnership with Paraderm, one of the Gung’s remaining big Corps, only to find that Gung Corps are still not keen to work with hubs. The usual nonsense. The Gung is happy to be in control, but the moment they’re expected to share power or cooperate, the usual paranoia surfaces. A viewpoint verging on the fantastical—seeking to reinterpret distance as assumed superiority, when verifiable truth shows that the hubs have been beholden to the Gung’s assumed superiority all these years.

She’d expected better from Paraderm, run by power couple Marcus and Tahira Shaheen-Lox.

What a shame to be disappointed.

But versed in the contrariness of life, Evelyn always has a back-up plan, and this one called for a sealed-off lab generally used as a safe zone for hazardous trials reimagined as a holding cell. Inside, Marcus and Tahira await, strapped into medical chairs. Marcus is enraged, shouting, not seeming to realize the glass is soundproofed. Tahira looks around, her gaze calculating, her demeanour collected and assured. There’s only one way to calculate out of this, and Evelyn rather imagines they won’t. What a shame.

Keel scans entry with his pass, holding the door open and moving aside to allow her to enter first. Such a gentleman.

Evelyn nods pleasantly at both of them.

“I realize this is unconventional. I do apologize,” she says. “I wanted to offer you a last chance to sign up in partnership with Tsai Holdings before I’m forced to take steps.”

“Unconventional?” Tahira’s voice is a whip slicing the air. “This is illegal. It is criminal. It is not unconventional.”

“Well quite,” Evelyn says, with a small smile. “But you left me little choice. My current stratagems are heavily invested in securing Paraderm’s resources.”

“The offer of a business partnership does not come with an imperative to acquiesce.” Marcus. Finally calm. Quietly furious.

“Of course not, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be anything like so rude as to insist, but there’s a little more at stake, is there not? I’m not the only one to have secured footage from four weeks ago, showing how vulnerable we are, how wrong we have all been, how complacent. I’m certainly not the only one repulsed by Fulcrum’s theft of part of my consciousness. We none of us signed an agreement that our avatars should be so… functional. The abuse of power is beyond disgust and the aberrations it produced beyond offensive.”

“We might agree that recent weeks have brought a stark new reality to light,” Tahira replies, her voice shaking, “but we do not agree with any of your other sentiments—we were disconcerted at first, but we have come to accept the ways things are. Accept our avatars for who they are. Your attitude is beyond disgusting, your opinions beyond offensive.”

Evelyn nods. “I see.” She gestures to Keel. “This is my Pharm, Keel. If you’re still reluctant to join with Tsai Holdings, he has a gift for you.”

Tahira raises a brow. “We were not interested in working with Tsai Holdings,” she says. “And after this violation of our rights, we would never consider working with Tsai Holdings, now or in the future. Not under any circumstances.”

Marcus directs a look of fierce admiration at Tahira. “It is as my wife says,” he adds. “You have nothing to offer Paraderm, and Paraderm has nothing to offer you.”

“As you wish. Keel?”

Waiting by the chilled cabinets at the lab’s edge, Keel opens one to remove a small, clear box. Carefully, he shakes out two small tabs like bumps, the stim drugs keeping a fair portion of the population of the hubs and the Gung happy.

“One at a time or both at once?” he asks Evelyn.

“Oh, both at once,” she says. “This is merely a formality.”

Standing between them, he presses the tabs into their necks and watches impassively as they go rigid. Marcus makes a high keening noise, a double note so disturbing Evelyn has to fight not to wince—after all she is human. As his keening increases, the room fills with golden light. Beside them, gold threads begin to spin and weave, building a dolphin and a lion fish mid-air, panicked and thrashing.

Tahira starts to scream, a counterpoint to her husband’s loud keen, her body arched and writhing. The fish and the dolphin stutter into frantic, spasmodic rolls, spinning over and over, their paler gold bellies flashing like alarms, fear and panic palpable until they freeze at the exact moment Marcus and Tahira seize up and cease making noise. The precision is extraordinary, leaving brittle silence in which four bodies, two gold, two human, writhe in unison and then stop.

The moment is eerie, like a freeze frame in VR. Almost unreal. The gleam of light in their eyes, the stillness of their chests, the fixity of their limbs almost unnerving. Five seconds seem to roll on forever, and then the tableau breaks. Marcus and Tahira slump, lax, into the embrace of their chairs and both avatars drift away to rest against the counter, casting warm yellow light like a buttercup beneath a chin. Loose. Limp. Lifeless.

Evelyn walks over to the CEOs of Paraderm. Leans in to take a close look. They’re just about breathing, a grip on life so tenuous she could hold a hand over their mouth and nose and count away seconds to end them. Their eyes are wide but dull, empty of everything, a huge contrast to rage, to calculation. How fragile humanity is. How reliant upon such brittle connections. Evelyn waves a hand in front of Marcus’s face.

“Which version was this?”

“Early. You wanted it to be harsh.”

“So I did.” Evelyn had all but forgotten her initial intent to be cruel; their maudlin attachment to their avatars lowered her opinion of them. One does not punish lesser adversaries. One removes them. “Interesting reactions. The latest have, I presume, lost all traces of this… extremity?”

“Of course. And once I have Paraderm’s laboratories it’ll move faster toward sophistication.”

Evelyn straightens Tahira’s jacket, left askew by her writhing. “Marvellous. And the digitization?”

“Soon.”

After the fall of Fulcrum, Keel approached her with a remarkable claim about the small band of J-Hacks and pirates who overthrew the massive Corp. He told her that they’d severed the Queens—the remarkable, massive avatars Fulcrum failed to keep control of—from Josef Lakatos with a drug of some fashion, a disconnection drug, and used it to trap them in Core. He told her he could synthesize this drug. The worth of it was immediately apparent: power. Power over Slip without the need to find the Haunt. An edge, as it were. Evelyn loves having an edge.

She gave him open access to all Tsai Holdings’ resources. In the four weeks since the fall, he’s managed to synthesize the drug until it worked the way it worked on Josef. And then he began to experiment, to try and make it do what Evelyn wants—separate and contain, so that Tsai Holdings can control access to avatars, and therefore the Slip. And he has. What he needs now if they’re to achieve the next step of digitization, is lab technology developed and fiercely guarded by Paraderm, and more test subjects.

Once they have the drug digitized, they’ll release it into Slip. Return avatars to where they belong. Put things to rights, and make a little profit—or a great deal of profit—to boot. Evelyn did not ask to be gifted a sentient helpmeet. She wanted only a vehicle. A means of transport within Slip. She does not care for its mind or its selfhood, she did not give her permission to Fulcrum for it to have either. That is the biggest insult, the theft of choice. Of control. Ensuring Tsai Holdings controls the only access to Slip will return choice to her whilst further securing her company’s financial future.

After all, what will people not pay to have access to Slip? Especially now when, in the wake of Fulcrum’s fall and the Queens’ destruction, it has become more than merely a means to communicate and play. It has become worlds within worlds—a fount of creativity. Too much creativity. Such freedoms lead to unwarranted confidence. To revolution. Best to put a bottle-neck on it all. Remind people of their place. What better way than to make them pay for their freedom again? Money is the great leveller.

“Be faster than soon, Keel. Now we can obtain Paraderm’s resources I expect swift results.” She doesn’t wait for a response. She leaves the lab, throwing casually over her shoulder as the door closes behind her, “Have someone put those two somewhere safe.”

The lift back up to her office provides her with a moment to reflect. An important ritual. Evelyn has always taken time to chew over success, to revel in it. She’s never once let a moment such as this pass unnoticed or uncelebrated. Not only the big victories, the tiny ones too; the first item of clothing she bought from a shop rather than received from a charity; the first meal eaten under a roof that did not leak; the first tiny promotion from Reception into the building proper.

Small steps lead to big ones. Tiny victories precede unimaginable wins. Now she has Paraderm under control—after a little creative paperwork management by her legal team—she’s in a better position to replace chaos with order. To dictate the future rather than be swept up in it. That was the worst of Fulcrum’s advantage, having to give up portions of vital control, to let another lead. Evelyn is not good at concession.

Back in her office, the paperwork dealt with so her lawyers can go ahead and take control of Paraderm in her name, Evelyn resumes her vigil at the window, sipping a cup of soothing peppermint tea. Other Corps and powers on the hubs are hoping to secure the Haunt and his swarm somehow, hoping to grab power by holding the key. Whilst they scrabble after ghosts, she will step into real power.

Leave them all behind.

Beneath.