Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘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 wail: ‘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 .’

‘The examining physician thought that the loss of brain matter was commensurate with a twelve-gauge shotgun. But they were certain that a small-calibre pistol accounted for the head wound at the time of your examination.’

Cory turned to an earlier report. Santiago, 1947: an unidentified male is found in a hotel room, killed by a self-inflicted shotgun blast through the roof of the mouth.

‘Dear Christ. Since 1947,’ he said, his voice weak with awe. He put a hand to his head. Even now, he found it difficult to accept that the skull cavity was, for the most part, filled with fluid. His conscious mind was a simulation running elsewhere. In his blood? In pieces, in his fucking blood? ‘It’s not fair,’ he continued. ‘The ichor should have rebuilt me. Me .’

Those fields around Atlanta. Those high times. That hope.

‘It did, in a way. I’m sorry.’

‘We were going–’ his breath shuddered—‘to call it Camelot.’

‘I really am.’

‘Saskia, I had a wife. Catherine.’

No, I didn’t.

My humanity exited my head in 1947 with the shotgun pellets. The man I was is no more than a gag reflex.

‘I’m a ghost after all. Dead these sixty years.’

‘Not dead. It’s not the right word.’

‘What do I do, Saskia? How do I checkmate the ichor? How do I step outside myself?’

‘Nobody does.’

‘I can,’ he said, and stepped towards her. ‘What are you waiting for?’

In a motion that matched his, Saskia stepped back.

Boo! he howled, his voice a wind across the steppe of her mind.

She pulled the trigger and the gun’s conducting filaments deployed. Their barbs pierced his neck and he coughed, tried to wrench them away, but the barbs were deep. The electrical charge burned him like venom. Flexing muscles ripped their sinews. His chin snapped to his chest and his arms swooped.

Red words only he could see blazed across the night:

I-Core had to shut down unexpectedly.

This , he screamed inside the copy of his mind, groping for the bounds of his consciousness with the ichor subtracted, this is what’s left of me, you fucks .

With that ember, he bullied himself over the rail. He saw Saskia’s face—blank as the moon—and fell, neck snared in the dead filaments, through the twelve long seconds down, finally alone, and calm. There was no smart matter to cup his body and unfurl great, pale wings in the facsimile of a carrion-eating bird, calling Ee-caw, ee-caw. He was alone. He remembered the grace of his wife in a waltz. He smashed his back on the observation sphere and pinwheeled away from the spire. The coming impact, he guessed, would knock his ghost from his bones and send his essence through the ground. He roared to keep his eyes wide and savoured even the last metres. Then darkness. Into the earth. Into Catherine. Into Camelot.

Saskia tracked his body until it shrank into Alexanderplatz. There would be a man called Eckhard driving onto the square, a local criminal, who would collect the remains in return for cash and no questions. She closed her eyes to dark crescents, rheumy and discoloured. Like Cory, she had passed the threshold of death more than once and collected macabre souvenirs, but she still called it unknown. Mission completed: and in the unconsidered calm after that storm, she felt the absence of direction and the insistence of despair.