Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

The flare died inside Severyn’s pericardium. The limousine started to move.

“He should not have done that,” the voice grated, as the bleeding Priest and then Finch and then the other Priests disappeared from sight.

Severyn watched through the back window for a moment longer. Faced forward. “I’ll compensate for any medical costs incurred by my employee’s actions,” he said. “I won’t tolerate any sort of retribution to his person.”

“Still talking like you’ve got cards. And don’t pretend like you care. He’s an ant to you. We all are.”

Severyn assessed. The voice was synthesized, distorted, but something in the cadence made him think female speaker. Uncommon, for a Priest. He gambled.

“What is your name, madam?”

“I’m a man, parasite.”

Only a split second of hesitation before the answer, but it was more than enough to confirm his guess. Severyn had staked astronomical shares on such pauses, pauses that couldn’t be passed off as lag in the modern day. Signs of unsettledness. Vulnerability. It made his skin thrum. He imagined himself in a boardroom.

“No need for pretenses,” Severyn said. “I merely hoped to establish a more personable base for negotiation.”

“Fuck you.” A warble of static. Maybe a laugh. “Fuck you. There’s not going to be any negotiation. This isn’t a funding op. We just caught one of the biggest parasites on the planet. The Priesthood’s going to make you an example. Hook you to an autosurgeon and let it vivisect you on live feed. Burn what’s left of you to ash. No negotiations.”

Severyn felt the icy churn in his stomach again. Fear. He realized he’d almost missed it.

Girasol was dreaming many things at once. Even as she spoke to her captive in realtime, she perched in the limousine’s electronic shielding, shooting down message after desperate message he addressed to his security detail, his bank, his associates.

It took her nearly a minute to realize the messages were irrelevant. Grimes was trying to trigger an overuse failsafe in his implants, generate an error message that could sneak through to Nokia.

Such a clever bastard. Girasol dipped into his implants and shut them down, leaving him half-blind and stranded in realtime. She felt a sympathetic lurch as he froze, gray eyes clearing, clipped neatly away from his data flow. If only it was that easy to reach in and drag him out of that pristine white storage cone.

“There aren’t many female Priests,” Grimes said, as if he hadn’t noticed the severance. “I seem to recall their creed hates the birth control biochip almost as much as they hate neural puppeteering.” He flashed a beatific smile that made Girasol ache. “So much love for one sort of parasite, so much ichor for the other.”

“I saw the light,” Girasol said curtly, even though she knew she should have stopped talking the instant he started analyzing, prying, trying to break her down.

“My body is, of course, a volunteer.” Grimes draped his lean arms along the backseat. “But the Priesthood does have so many interesting ideas about what individuals should and should not do with their own flesh and bone.”

“Volunteers are as bad as the parasites themselves,” Girasol recited from one of Pierce’s Adderall-fueled rants. “Selling their souls to a digital demon. The tainted can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.”

“Don’t tell me a hacker riding sound waves still believes in souls.”

“You lost yours the second you uploaded to a storage cone.”

Grimes replied with another carefully constructed probe, but Girasol’s interest diverted from their conversation as Pierce’s voice swelled from far away. He was shouting. Someone else was in the room. She crosschecked the limo’s route against a staticky avalanche of police scanners, then dragged herself back to the orthochair, forcing her eyes open.

Through the blur of code, she saw Pierce’s injured crony, the one who’d been sliced belly to sternum, being helped through the doorway. His midsection was swathed in bacterial film, but the blood that hadn’t been coagulated and eaten away left a dripping carmine trail on the linoleum.

“You don’t bring him here,” Pierce grated. “You lobo, if someone saw you—”

“I’m not going to take him to a damn hospital.” The man pulled off his Fawkes, revealing a pale and sweat-slick face. “I think it’s, like, shallow. Didn’t get any organs. But he’s bleeding bad, need more cling film—”

“Where’s the caveman?” Pierce snapped. “The bodyguard, where is he?”

The man waved a blood-soaked arm towards the doorway. “In the parkade. Don’t worry, we put a clamp on him and locked the van.” His companion moaned and he swore. “Now where’s the aid kit? Come on, Pierce, he’s going to, shit, he’s going to bleed out. Those stairs nearly did him in.”

Pierce stalked to the wall and snatched the dented white case from its hook. He caught sight of Girasol’s gummy eyes half-open.

“How close are you to the warehouse?” he demanded.

“You know how the Loop gets on weekends,” Girasol said, feeling her tongue move inside her mouth like a phantom limb. “Fifteen. Twenty.”

Pierce nodded. Chewed his lips. Agitated. “Need another shot?”

“Yeah.”

Girasol monitored the limo at the hazy edge of her mind as Pierce handed off the aid kit and prepped another dose of hypnotic. She thought of how soon it would be her blood on the floor, once he realized what she was doing. She thought of slate gray eyes as she watched the oily black Dozr mix with her blood, and when Pierce hit the plunger, she closed her own and plunged with it.

Severyn was methodically peeling back flooring, ruining his manicured nails, humming protest rap, when the voice came back.

“Don’t bother. You won’t get to the brake line that way.”

He paused, staring at the miniscule tear he’d made. He climbed slowly back onto the seat and palmed open the chiller. “I was beginning to think you’d left me,” he said, retrieving a glass flute.

“Still here, parasite. Keeping you company in your final moments.”

“Parasite,” Severyn echoed as he poured. “You know, if it weren’t for people like you, puppeteering might have never developed. Religious zealots are the ones who axed cloning, after all. Just think. If not for that, we might have been uploading to fresh blank bodies instead of those desperate enough to sell themselves whole.”

He looked at his amber reflection in the flute, studying the beautiful young face he’d worn for nearly two years. He knew the disembodied hacker was seeing it too, and it was an advantage, no matter how she might try to suppress it. Humans loved beauty and underestimated youth. It was one reason Severyn used young bodies instead of the thickset middle-aged Clooneys favored by most CEOs.

“And now it’s too late to go back,” Severyn said, swirling his drink. “Growing a clone is expensive. Finding a volunteer is cheap.” He sipped and held the stinging Perdue in his mouth.

Silence for a beat.

“You have no idea what kind of person I am.”

Severyn felt his hook sink in. He swallowed his drink. “I do,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about it quite fucking hard, what with my impending evisceration. You’re no Priest. Your familiarity with my security systems and reticence to kill my bodyguard makes me think you’re an employee, former or current.”

“People like you assume everyone’s working for them.”

“Whether you are or not, you’ve done enough research to know I can easily triple whatever the Priesthood is paying for your services.”

“There’s not going to be any negotiation. You’re a dead man.”