Ian Hocking - Flashback

What are we doing here?

Ego’s voice entered her thoughts.

Fourteen seconds to go , it said. Confirm, please.

The break-in was about to begin. Black leather jacket: zipped shut. Black hiking trousers: new, four inches narrower at the waist. Black trainers.

Go , she thought .

Saskia started up the steps. Slowly. Carefully. She found the entrance door ajar, slipped inside, and waited with her back against the glass.

Five seconds remaining , said Ego.

Count me down.

Three, two, one. Go .

She ran across the dark foyer, entering both the tower and the abstract clockwork of her plan, which would unwind according to the roaming stares of the security cameras and the singular architecture of the building. This burst of running struck her wasted muscles with a sickly, sizzling weakness. She moved into a space formed by two staircases rising at right angles and dropped to one knee.

‘Fuck,’ she gasped, willing away the scintillations from her eyes. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’

Your heart rate is too high , said Ego. Breathe .

I’m breathing, don’t worry .

Five seconds.

As her vision tuned to the darkness, she noticed a bundle not two metres away. She narrowed her eyes. The thing resolved itself to a prone security guard. Like her, he occupied a surveillance blindspot. His attacker had placed him carefully. Saskia crawled towards the man and put her cheek to his mouth. He was alive.

Three, two, one, said Ego. Go .

She ran to the inner staircase and took the steps two at a time. Above her, a CCTV camera made a slow turn. This was the most exposed portion of her entry. She reached the halfway landing and swung on the banister to maintain her pace for the next flight. The muscles of her legs burned. Her fingers slipped on the metal, squeaking once, loudly, then she was bounding upwards once more. She knew that her progress was too slow—that the eastern surveillance camera would now have her feet coming into frame—but the final stairs were shadowed. If she could keep up the pace, and her luck held, she would make it.

You should run faster , said Ego.

Shut up.

Saskia reached the high landing just as the eye of the camera passed. She skipped to the lift doors. As she cuffed the panel, she took great breaths whose half-vocalised gasps sounded pathetic to the part of her mind already calculating the next stage of her break-in. She looked up. The camera was beginning to turn back. She waited. She was transfixed by its slow arc.

Ego, where is the lift?

It is sixty metres away and falling. Now thirty. Now twenty. Be ready on my mark.

Saskia looked again at the camera. Its gaze approached, came closer–

Hurry it up, Ego.

Mark .

– and moved across the front of the lift. Saskia was not there. She was inside, rising through the tower.

Saskia was both grateful for this rest and dismayed at the weakness of her body. But the frantic stage was over. Now she could turn her attention from security, and therefore capture, to her own safety. She considered the many turns that the next few minutes could take. What if her intuitions about Cory were wrong? He could do little to Saskia that had not been done already, but he knew the points of Saskia’s weakness by name: Jem. Danny. Karel. Hrafn.

At the thought of Danny, Saskia dropped her eyes.

There was a shape in the darkness.

Ego, I need night vision. Can you push my wetware device to the limit?

The scene did not brighten, but its contours and shapes became more easily parsed. There were false positives—odd, fleeting geometric primitives and angles. Amid this noise, however, one true object stood out.

Ego, Cory’s cane is leaning against the side of the lift , she thought. The wave of panic accompanying the realisation triggered a counteracting irritation at her jumpiness. When her fear was controlled, she thought, Ego?

It may be aware of you , it said. I can’t tell.

The cane toppled to the carpeted floor.

She pressed herself into the corner and looked at the red altimeter. She was less than halfway.

The cane shortened, grew darker, and melted into a black puddle. She tilted her head with a mixture of disgust and curiosity.

Ego? It’s doing something.

Describe it, please.

From the thick puddle—blood-like in the red light—a hand rose.

It’s… transforming .

I recommend you abort, Saskia. You should take the lift to the ground floor.

No, I’m not running up here again. I’m almost at the top.

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.