Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Axl was being taught that he wanted to live. It was the old man’s present to a favourite pupil.

Inside the passenger’s skull, his brain underwent a massive limbic surge as old as humanity. C/cholamines kicked up fight or flight energy release and a slower, amygdala-driven ripple primed his adreno-cortical nervous system for extended conflict.

And as the burn-in alternated between targeting Axl’s neocortex with feelings of outrage or injustice and firing up his amygdala to create sudden blinding rages, sweat beaded along his hair line, ran down his forehead and dripped into the hollow of his eyes.

In earlier centuries the effect was variously known as neuro-linguistic programming, brainwashing and conversion ... To Axl, the impotent rage and blind fear just felt like being a child again.

‘Okay,’ said the Colt finally. ‘That covers what I want. Now what about you?’

Both gun and fat little priest were in a tiny, windowless office behind the main altar, little more than a recessed doorway tilled with a simple wooden table and two ordinary-looking chairs. Blocking off the entrance was a heavy velvet curtain through which the little priest had carried the gun a couple of days earlier.

Sábado was long since gone, glad to get away from the glances of the tourists and the worried scowls of the security guards. On the way out he stopped only once, to take a handful of white candles from a box below the wrought-iron racks. He figured the cathedral could afford it.

‘What do I want?’ Father Moritz turned the Colt over in his fingers and thought about the question. It made a change from thinking about the gun itself, which was what he’d been doing every waking hour.

The barrel was warm, exactly blood temperature. But the man didn’t know if that was intentional, to stop the gun showing up during heat scans, or just because he’d been holding the weapon for so long.

He’d owned a Colt like this once, not quite this modern, but close enough. And he knew just how much that had cost. Enough to feed a favela family for a year, two families, five families… Maybe even feed the whole district. His Colt hadn’t even been fully aware, only semiTuring but even back then the price could have paid to pipe in fresh water for a whole street.

Father Moritz was struggling hard to be upset and disgusted, to be appalled at the waste and horror, at the destruction inherent in such an overworked bit of machinery, but that wasn’t his nature. And besides, no one could tell him about waste. As the sole inheritor of three genome patents he’d spent most of his early life trying to throw money away. And he’d grown up around beautiful, overpriced objets d’art. It would be a falsehood to deny that the Colt was stunning in its functional simplicity and the elegance of its design. That was why he’d spent forty-eight hours polishing up the tiny, understated, jewel-like diodes that constantly lit in sequence down the gun’s side.

For a second Father Moritz wondered if the Colt was running some kind of empathy routine on him. If so, it was doing a good job.

‘ It’s not my fault.’ The small priest’s lips twisted into a sad smile. ‘The serpent made me do it. . .’

No, he wasn’t a child. Resting the Colt on the pine table in front of him Father Moritz quite literally sat on his hands to stop himself reaching for it again.

‘Well,’ said the Colt, sounding amused. ‘I want to see His Eminence. Why don’t you tell me what you want?’

So the small priest did.

Even the hiPower was surprised. And this was a model that prided itself on how well it understood humans.

Axl remembered screaming at the darkness, but the darkness didn’t answer him. Then he slept, only to wake and start screaming again. Until his howls faded back into the kinder darkness of sleep…

Snapping awake, Axl tried to open his eyes and remembered too late that he didn’t have any. What he did have was a pain in his temples that defied description and blobs of sick stuck to his stubbled chin where an over-full vomitsac had ruptured part of its seal. Only what was left of the bag’s one-way valve was stopping its entire contents from floating off around the cabin.

He would have screamed again but he didn’t have the energy and recent experience suggested he try a different approach.

It wasn’t the same shuttle, but obviously Axl didn’t know that. He’d been swapped at Planetside Arrivals, ferried in a coffin from the Shuttle PS 1308 to a sleek purple Boeing Cruiser with discreet gold livery and a triple-hatted papal cartouche set into the door. None of the ground staff was remotely surprised when a coffin was transferred from the Shuttle to the Nuncio’s cruiser. Not when they knew the Papal Nuncio was on his way to Samsara. Being buried on Samsara was this year’s big thing, and last year’s and most probably next year’s as well.

‘Oh, so you’re awake.’ The voice made a bad job of trying to sound friendly.

Axl grunted.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Painkillers,’ demanded Axl.

The stewardess ignored him and offered Perrier or hot chocolate as alternatives. Rules said no requests were to be refused outright.

Axl, however, hadn’t been trained to the same level of social skills. ‘Painkillers are what I want. And if you don’t get me painkillers,’ he said slowly, so there could be no danger of the machine not understanding, ‘I’m going to rip you off the armrest and personally take your chips out through your arse…’ To reinforce his point, Axl shot out his hand and grabbed metal.

He could have told the semiAI when it released his arm restraints that this was a bad idea, but he’d been unconscious at the time. And the semiAI overseeing his private cabin at the back of the Nuncio’s ship didn’t seem to be listening to him anyway.

Quite who, at Boeing, had thought it would be a great idea to kit out each seat with its own ten-inch-high, overpneumatic, underdressed sprite able to summon bar trolleys and tea or coffee machines to order, Axl didn’t know. But judging from the diaphanous costume under his fingers and the improbable length of the legs now kicking against his wrist, he figured them for some Japanese throwback. Women, of course, were assigned male attendants, though dom, fem and neuter were always available on request.

‘I don’t carry painkillers, sir,’ said the stewardess through gritted teeth. If nothing else, her voice programming was a masterpiece.

‘Then make some,’ Axl suggested. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe the coffee, wine and food usually served before take-off was actually real. At least not really real, merely molecularly perfect. There had to be a bank of limited-function Drexie boxes someone on board.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have those facilities,’ said a childlike voice that was new. And, childlike or not, this time the voice carried a little more authority. It added, ‘sir,’ to the sentence as an afterthought.

Cabin chief, Axl decided.

‘That true?’ Axl asked the stewardess and squeezed.

The sprite kept discreetly silent, which didn’t improve Axl’s temper at all.

‘Look,’ he said furiously. ‘I feel like shit, okay?’

There was a second’s silence when Axl was sure the cabin chief wanted to tell him he looked like shit too, but didn’t. Instead it contented itself with suggesting he let go of the stewardess.

‘No fucking way. Not until I get some painkillers.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not. . .’

Axl tightened his grip on the sprite and it yelped, high and strange, like a small dog that someone had accidentally stepped on.