Jonathan Howard - Katya's World

Some images are destined to stay in the mind’s eye for the rest of one’s life. Katya knew that, if she lived through this, what she saw in that room would haunt her in the moments before sleep and in the dreams that followed. She had braced herself for the worst thing she could imagine; Tokarov’s mummified corpse caught in a paroxysm of agony forever perhaps, the moment of interface caught forever in tableau. What she actually found was far, far worse.

Tokarov was alive, but what a diseased impersonation of life it was. The interface chair had grown into him, the matter of the throne having grown hundreds, thousands of wiry cables like the grappling tentacles in the docking bay. The cables were thinner here, black and glistening in a foul oily fashion. The tips of the tentacles were all imbedded in Tokarov’s flesh, latching onto nerve endings and muscle ganglion, hijacking his motor functions and devouring his reason. His pale skin seemed dark with the mass of tentacles, some as thin as threads, some as broad as fingers, that cut and penetrated and usurped and writhed his whole body. A hemisphere in the ceiling directly above the throne dangled yet more, vanishing into his ears, his nose and his eyes. Only his mouth had been left alone and they could all hear his ragged breathing even from the door.

Lukyan swore. Katya fought down the urge to vomit. Kane only watched. He lifted his own hand to inspect it and Katya noticed several small crescent-shaped scars on him, the marks of the Leviathan ’s failed attempt to interface with him. She wanted to hate him for shirking this fate and leaving it to befall somebody else, but she couldn’t. She didn’t like to think what she might have done herself to avoid this hideous devouring.

Kane lowered his hand and, with infinite reluctance, took a step forwards. Instantly, a section of the chamber’s ceiling dilated and the Medusa sphere descended on its stalk. Kane froze in mid-step as several purple targeting dots appeared on his face and chest. He took a slow breath and said quietly to himself, “I’m not dead, am I? No? That’s good. Stepping back now.” He reversed his stride, but the sphere continued to target him.

“Kane, you’re the only one who’s been targeted. Katya and I are clear,” said Lukyan in a measured, conversational tone, “that’s different from last time.”

“It seems personal,” whispered Katya.

“I was thinking that myself.” Kane looked down at the half dozen targeting spots that moved slowly across his chest like confused insects.

“You knew,” said the Leviathan , but it was not the even tones of their last visit. The intonation was human. “You knew !”

“Of course I knew, Tokarov,” said Kane directly to the human wreckage in the chair. “I warned you to stay away from that thing. I wish I’d known about your ulterior motive for staying behind. I’d never have agreed if I had.”

“I can feel it. It’s eating my mind.” The Leviathan ’s voice –Tokarov’s voice — was full of horror and, worse still, defeat. Katya knew he’d given up and accepted this terrible fate.

“Every time you express your personality, the Leviathan will monitor it as a malfunction, hunt down the section of your brain that generated it and… I don’t know what to call what it does. Reconfigures it, I suppose.” There was no catch in Kane’s voice, but Katya was surprised to see a silent tear roll down his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Tokarov. If there was anything I could do, I would do it.”

“I… No! Not me! The Leviathan doesn’t trust you anymore.” The machine voice modulated and cracked with emotions it had never been created to express. “The Yagizba Conclaves attacked. You are their ally. You are an enemy. You warned me. You are the only one who knows. You are a friend.” The targeting dots shuddered around Kane as man and machine warred. “Kane is a real and present threat. Kane can help me. Kane is a category one threat. Kane has to… It fears you, Kane. It fears you!”

Kane looked up at the Medusa sphere. “Learnt about fear, have you?” He took another step back. “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

“I know what you did, Kane. It’s all in the Leviathan ’s memory. I know how you poisoned yourself to prevent interface.”

Lukyan shot a hard glance at Kane, who was at pains not to return it. “Yes, well. Desperate times make for…”

“That was clever,” interrupted Tokarov in the Leviathan ’s voice. “I wish I’d been as clever.”

“Not your fault. Maybe I should have been more specific in my warnings. Anyway, you didn’t have the resources handy.” Kane slid his hand nonchalantly into his jacket pocket. When it came out again, Katya saw it cradled a pressure syringe. In its transparent barrel, a black liquid. She kept her face expressionless with a massive effort of will and returned to looking straight ahead.

“The Leviathan wanted to kill you. As soon as I… we detected the drone #6 signal, it knew you were coming back and it wanted to kill you. Kane is a category… I confused it… supposed to make allowances during interface… follow my instincts even if it doesn’t understand them… I didn’t want you to die.”

Where there’s life, there’s hope, thought Katya. She stepped forward. “Does it trust me?”

“You are unrecognised,” said the Leviathan , before immediately adding, “You’re a clever girl, you saved the Novgorod . Category one… category blue…”

As Katya walked slowly forward, she took the syringe from Kane’s hand. He wasn’t expecting the action and almost dropped it before she had it from him and concealed along the line of her forearm. He glared intensely at her as she walked past. “It could kill you in a second.”

“Tokarov’s doing everything he can to keep it off balance and sacrificing himself to do it. In a minute, everything he ever was will be gone. We can’t waste that minute.” She said it quietly as she continued to walk and wasn’t even sure if Kane caught all of it. Perhaps, she wondered, she was just saying it to herself to root herself in the moment and the minute to follow.

She walked steadily, neither so slow that time was frittered away or so quickly that it might antagonise the Leviathan despite its scattered priorities. She wondered how many targeting dots the Medusa sphere had painted on her; none or ten? She wondered if the sphere killed painlessly, or only silently. And, before she had time to wonder anything else, she was standing before Tokarov.

The interface threads, cables and tentacles flexed slowly as if connected to some great, ponderous heart, beating a thin ichor of machine hatred into Tokarov to replace his red, human blood. The tentacles running into his eye sockets must surely have destroyed the eyes and Katya remembered they had been a hazel brown once. She looked upon him unflinchingly, saw where his eyelids were rubbed raw from being unable to close but trying all the same, smelled the surgical scent of antiseptics and antibiotics the machine must be using to keep his body functioning until it had no further use for it, and felt the fear of an ebbing mind.

“Tokarov,” she said gently. “It’s me, Katya.”

“I know,” he half whispered, half sobbed through his own mouth rather than through the Leviathan . “I know. It can see you. Watching you.”

A thought occurred to her and it seemed a ridiculous thought at first, but then she immediately realised that it wasn’t ridiculous at all. For Tokarov at that moment, it might be the most important question anybody had ever asked him, so she asked it. “What’s your name? I can’t just call you Tokarov. What’s your whole name?”