redRobe

Chapter Nineteen Monosyllabic/Monochromatic

‘Wake now,’ said the stewardess and Axl did, into the darkness he was coming to dread. Almost half of his life hadn’t been enough to come to terms with losing his internal backing track and he knew the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough for him to learn to face being blinded with anything other than gut-churning self pity. That knowledge was almost as sickening as being swallowed by the blackness.

‘Come on, wake up,’ repeated the voice.

Just by listening he knew she was out of reach. Cramps were spreading up his left arm and he guessed she’d just pumped norAdrenaline into his wrist implant to kick him awake. It worked, he was jumpier than a rattlesnake.

‘We’re here.’

‘Where?’ Axl asked.

‘Where you’re going.’ Her answer was bright, accurate and utterly unhelpful. ‘I’m going to get the cabin chief now…’

There was a sudden silence to go with the blackness. So Axl just waited, keeping his thoughts to a bare minimum. Which was pretty easy given the steady thud of blood in his head and a writhing ratking knot in his stomach that gnawed like hunger but was probably fear.

Two-thirds of the human mind is taken up processing sight. And okay, not even Axl knew what was being logic-chunked through his unconscious mind, but his conscious brain knew only too well that it was missing visual input. And since over sixty percent of information stored in the brain got there via sight, his brain was missing it bigtime.

The cabin he was in was almost completely noiseless, Axl realised. Just the low thud of airfilters lazily converting his breath back into oxygen.

‘You feeling better now?’ The voice of the cabin chief was polite, but not that polite. Axl flipped out a hand and grinned when he heard the overgrown toy take a quick step backwards.

‘Maybe not,’ the voice said petulantly. And then there was silence again.

Outside, the Nuncio’s cruiser kept pace with the edge of Samsara, rising slowly towards the wheel while the ship waited for the opening of a steel iris to let it pass into the first of many locks. Coming into its approach, the Boeing’s AI had passed control to Tsongkhapa. Though what took control of the Boeing, moving the cruiser up through the iris, its forward speed exactly matching that of the Wheel’s outer rim, was a subset of a subset, obviously enough. A mere fragment of intelligence.

But still it was running code it knew intimately and the Nuncio’s Boeing hung exactly in the centre of the closing lock: from outside the wheel it would have looked as if the silver, purple and gold vessel was framed by a circle of black.

Below the cruiser the metal iris closed, vents opened as pressure was equalised and then an iris overhead unfurled like the petals of a chrysanthemum folding back into nothing. The elegant cruiser climbed a level and then that iris closed below it. Vents hissing softly as the ceiling overhead began to unfurl. There were a dozen locks, maybe more. Axl didn’t count them, he just heard the hiss of vents, each one louder than the one before as the pressure began to reach atmospheric.

The entry point to the new world was the crater of what could have been a high and unlikely volcano, except for the final steel iris which unfurled to deliver the Nuncio’s cruiser high above lakes and dark oak forests set on the floor of a broad valley.

From the crater, entering shuttles descended the high mountain towards Vajrayana City. The effect—carefully chosen—was as if the craft had merely flown in from another part of the new world.

‘You’ll need this.’ The cabin chief was back again. Manifesting as a cold emptiness in a world of darkness sticky with sparks of neural feedback, like snow burning up the screen of an untuned newsfeed. Axl could hear the toy breathing.

‘Need what?’ Axl asked. He wasn’t enjoying himself.

‘This...'

It was soft and wet, round and sticky like a peeled plum. Axl realised the cabin chief was just waiting for the question and knew too that he wasn’t going to like the answer. But Axl asked it anyway.

‘What is it?’

‘Well,’ the voice was studiedly neutral. ‘How can I… ? But if you tell me whether you prefer to see with your left or right…’ Fingers began wiping crusted blood from below both eye sockets and Axl finally realised what he was holding. He didn’t know whether to laugh or weep.

‘Animal?’ Axl asked.

‘Synthetic. Red Cross standard issue.’

That was worse. Polymer lens and liquid-plastic optic fluid. Primitive self-adhering nerve splice. They worked all right, after a fashion: if you didn’t mind the world in black and white. Rod cells were cheaper to mimic, even when you needed one hundred million of them. The colour-defining cone cells were more expensive.

But that wasn’t the real problem with emergency-issue optics. No, getting them out again was the fuck up. And they were only really good if fitted within seventy-six hours of initial damage.

Axl tried to count off the time from leaving Villa Carlotta in his head and realised he had little idea exactly how long he’d been on the shuttle. That he was actually on the Nuncio’s cruiser he didn’t know at all.

Mind you, clinics on Samsara that could rush grow him two new eyes or enhance his body with integrated armour were likely to range from few to non-existent. And, he’d be lucky if he even found a decent gun. Tsongkhapa might be the most advanced post-Turing AI in existence but as a Buddhist it disliked weapons-relevant technology.

Axl couldn’t fault the logic. Aggression in humans was hardwired. That’s why satori was so difficult… Difficult like sawing off your own maggot-infested leg was difficult. One madman with a blade could gut his family. With a Browning pulse/R he could clear his ‘hood. With a tank he could take out the next ‘burb and with a LockMart X37 the next country. Give the idiot a fission device and he could unmake his planet.

Hardwiring didn’t change, only the technology to hand.

Faultless logic, but shit understanding of how the real world worked. So far as Axl was concerned, Tsongkhapa was living proof that machine intelligence was overrated. He liked logic units where they belonged, in the handle of a gun or operating his fridge.

‘Okay,’ said Axl, flipping the peeled plum into the air, ‘how does this work?’

‘Plug and play,’ said the cabin chief brightly.

‘Yeah, right...' Axl fumbled a catch and caught the eye just as it was sliding off his lap.

‘Here.’ The cabin chief lent across and took the sticky ball. There was a quick hiss as the toy yanked the tab on a courtesy towel, breaking it out of its vacuum-packed silver foil, and then he was wiping grit and cotton fluff off the eye.

‘Just put it in,’ suggested the toy when he handed it back.

Axl did.

Pulling open his right eyelid Axl pushed and his new eye slide home with a wet slurp. Pain flared as tiny feelers burrowed through the damaged tissue of his eye socket like shoots, grappling the inferior rectus, lateral and superior oblique muscles. Cells divided, wasted muscle tissue started to regrow.

Specialised shoots found and tapped what had once been the working optic nerve to Axl’s right eye. A complex pattern of send and receive began between the new eye’s control chip and Axl’s visual cortex, as the optic brought itself into sequence.

Black faded to grey and then blinding white. All Axl felt was sick and frightened. Deep down sick for the first time in more years than he could remember.

Around him the dazzle of static faded and downward lines solidified into a grey bulkhead hung with a Bokhara carpet. Flat rectangles turned to seats, all empty. There were no real windows, but a Tosh screen framed by folded-back wooden shutters came into focus to show African children rolling in the waves on the edge of a beach.

It didn’t look like something found on a shuttle.

Axl pushed the thought to the back of his mind and kept looking round. He was seeing the world in monochrome low/Res with the colour, contrast and brightness turned right down.

‘Okay?’ The cabin chief was watching him. A child’s face with pouting lips and wide eyes offset by a sly smile. Blond hair probably ... it showed up pale in B&W anyway.

‘Yeah,’ said Axl, ‘just fine.’

‘Good,’ the cabin chief said blandly. ‘Let’s do the rest of it’

Axl looked at him.

‘Your arm, that rig glued to your head ...”

Oh, that stuff. Axl nodded, glancing down at the implant in his wrist, flesh puffed up around its edges. He couldn’t see the rig he was wearing and didn’t even want to think about the spike in the back of his skull, but something told him those wouldn’t be any better fitted either.

‘You want to do this unconscious?’

No, he didn’t.

‘Whatever.’ The toy lent over and yanked out all four wrist feeds at once. Axl was pretty sure that wasn’t how disconnections were meant to be done.

‘Forehead’s going to hurt,’ the cabin chief said. It didn’t sound upset about the fact.

The cabin chief was right too, but it didn’t hurt for long. A quick hiss of foamBone, a burst of cold and analgesic skin had been sprayed over the open wound almost before it had a chance to bleed.

The movement was practised, maybe too practised. Axl looked at the toy again. Pouting, pretty, vacuous and quietly vicious, the cabin chief looked like the real thing. Maybe they were all trained in battlefield medicine or maybe this one was a special, something kept in reserve. Alternatively, maybe the Cardinal had just requisitioned it from the Vatican. If the Enquirer was to be believed, the city was filling up with vicious little blond boys now Joan was gone.

‘Spike,’ said the cabin chief and Axl tried not to freeze.

‘You know how to remove it?’

The toy looked at Axl, eyes cold. ‘I put it in,’ the cabin chief said shortly. ‘Chances are, I can get it out again… Can’t do a foamBone heal though, not for a spike. The plug shouldn’t give you problems so long as you don’t try to pull it out.’

Instant trepanning.

Well, it went with all the other enlightenment shit. Axl didn’t know any real reason why he might want to remove a skull plug from the back of his head and he didn’t bother to ask. He just wanted off the shuttle. Followed by some sleep, maybe some food and a weapon. He’d never felt so naked in his life.

Axl had no gun, not even a boot blade. All he did have were two tiny DNA polymerase wet chips, matched to Father Sylvester’s genome. Plus another two for Joan’s sister. Modified standards. Any body fluid from either would do—snot, blood, whatever. Drychips could have handled skin flakes, dirt and hair but they were bigger, more obvious. And besides drys weren’t Red Cross standard issue, while wet chips were. He had two dozen of the things. Only four of those were specifically modified, the rest cheap mass-produced refugee fodder. The kind of chip that told you if you were dying of flu or the retro Virus a couple of days ahead of it actually happening.

‘Okay’, said the cabin chief. ‘Final shot.’

There was a hiss cold against the side of Axl’s neck and then the darkness began to roll back in.