Flashback

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Berlin

On Alexanderplatz, at three in the morning, raining, there was nobody around but Saskia Brandt. She looked up the concrete steps of the TV tower and let her gaze travel to the red-winking pinnacle. Her hair, which had almost regained its former length, streamed out in the wind and drizzle. She shifted her weight from her left leg to her right. She needed constant reminding of her body’s capacities. It was reduced in some ways, extended in others. She felt the concrete beneath her trainers; caught her hair and drew it behind her ears. All the while, she stared at the pinnacle of the tower, thinking.

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.

‘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:

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.

She looked down again. Her unfocused eyes mirrored the glowing circuits of the cityscape. She remembered reaching around Jem’s waist to release the magazine from the gun that might have killed her—flicking the bullets into the sink thumb-stroke by thumb-stroke.

The taser seemed to appear and disappear in the winking navigation lamps. She put the barrel to her chest.

So. If she jumped, no true suicide could follow. Luck upon luck would conspire against her death because an event in 2023 must have an older Saskia as its cause. But the taser was still in her hand. Its charge would blow out the last dust of her mind, leaving her body to a woman whom Saskia knew only in reflections. Saskia’s memories would be erased and, with them, her being. The mountains of her life would flatten. Her love for Jem would zero out.

She squeezed the trigger.

‘You are not going to do this,’ said Jem, breathless in Saskia’s ear. The hands of the English woman passed around Saskia and gripped the gun. Saskia released the trigger and let her head rest against Jem’s cheek. The taser dropped over the gantry. It flashed like a tumbling coin, dinged the observation tower, and was gone. Saskia watched Jem’s hands slip away. She turned.

‘I told you not to come, Jem.’

The gantry was empty.

Jem was not here, or anywhere in Berlin. She was in England, of course, and had been since the day after the dinner.

Ego?

Nothing. It could not hear her this close to the pinnacle. There was too much interference.

Saskia stared at the gantry. Her hair blew across her face. She pushed it away and slipped her stump into her back pocket. Then she stepped through the tower door, alone with her visions.