Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the gray matte surface of the weapon in his hands.

“But not us, right?”

“Fucking right, not us.” Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. “Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness , Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance . And you know how you get that?”

Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak , he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

But let Onbekend talk his way out.

“Tell you how you get that,” the dying thirteen rasped. “How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis—we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.” More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. “Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cutoffs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?”

“Yeah, so did we,” Carl said somberly. “Remember.”

“They tried to contain us.” Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desperately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like forever. “But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply , we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.”

“If you say so.” Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving toward Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

“Yeah, I do fucking say so.” The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the sun-touched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead; the arm was limp behind it. “We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.”

“You aren’t,” Carl pointed out.

Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. “No, but you can.”

“I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.”

“Hey, you’re the lottery guy.” Onbekend was gasping now. “Telling me you don’t feel lucky?”

“I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.”

Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. “There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.”

He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

“You’ll show them,” he bubbled.

The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

Outside, Carl could hear Bambarén’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

It was almost as if she were there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

We all will.

Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock, and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines, and then slung it around his neck, adjusting the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.

A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.

You’ll show them.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered.

Drag the armchair aside, crack the door, and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.

I’ll see you in the garden.

The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.

Deep breath.

Then he went out into the sun.

Richard K Morgan is the acclaimed author of Woken Furies , Market Forces , Broken Angels , and Altered Carbon , a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award. Morgan sold the movie rights for Altered Carbon to Joel Silver and Warner Bros. His third book, Market Forces , has also been sold to Warner Bros. and was winner of the John W. Campbell Award. He lives in Scotland.