Ymir, page 21
CHAPTER 59
Up the stairwell, the penultimate seven-flight stagger. Past the puddle, past the smeared smiley face, into the corridor. The dead mosscarpet is beautiful. Every step crackles and crunches. He skips his way to room 702 and fumbles a hand free; the door licks his thumb.
It feels like sanctuary when he steps inside and the lock buzz-clunks behind him. He is safe from the cold-blood stares in the street, from the red girl’s small contemptuous voice, from the drones that might grow Gausta’s face at any second. He’s alone and ready to celebrate his final night on Ymir.
“Stubborn Urbanite Memory,” he says. “Play me some music.”
He trips on something, nearly drops his grease-spotted cone of rinds. A long black box is lying on the floor. Gausta has managed his goodbye gift. He leans down and taps it with his finger, leaving a pock of red sauce. The box turns transparent, revealing the grendel’s flash-frozen arm, its lavascape rimed with frost. He sees the imprint of his raid glove. The cilia burrowed deep.
Yorick stares at the detached limb. It’s macabre, and wasteful, too—xenocarbon can be repurposed, even if it can’t be reverse-engineered. But the grendel wanted him to have it. He is almost sure of that now, after a dozen jagged dreams. Maybe it’s meant to be a reminder of his many sins.
He waits to feel bad, but he can’t. He’s past tender. He’s hollow now, in the best possible way.
“What sort of music would you like to listen to, Mister Bellica?” the hotel asks.
“Compose something.” Yorick touches his face and feels a half-mandible grin. “Please.”
He shoves the box into the smartglass closet.
CHAPTER 60
The hotel has been learning from Nocti. Yorick hears the ghost of those same strings, can almost see the musician and his peeled-open leg. He imagines the hotel collating sounds from Linka’s bar, sieving out melodies, reassembling the patterns that made heads turn and conversations taper. It adds a clacking drum, electronic pulses, whispering voices.
Wake music. It sounds like wake music. Yorick snakes his head to it as he goes to the kitchen corner, spills his bags on the fold-down counter. He eats standing up. Even with his olfactories cranked, the tastes are shades of what he remembers. Indistinct. He was hungrier as a child, and he had a fully flesh mouth, and maybe that makes a difference.
But he’s a different kind of hungry now, so he keeps eating. Tastes matter less than the textures, the temperatures. Those matter less than the consuming. He needs to fill his mouth, his gullet, his stomach until it aches. He wolfs down the steamed buns and packs the splintery crickets after them. Sauce spills down the front of his coat.
He shrugs it off, lays it carefully on the floor, and the room is hot now so he strips the rest of his clothes off, too. He folds them and drapes them on the nonsensical chair. He inspects his belly in the smartglass mirror. The incision has dwindled to a pale pink scar. He feels the weight of his full stomach behind it, a painless pressure.
The teledoc told him not to eat. He remembers that now. His regrown tissue is still delicate, and he has torpor in the morning.
“Humans are detritivores,” he tells the mirror, and shoves the last bun into his mouth.
CHAPTER 61
His boots disappear for a while; he circles the whole room searching before he feels them still on his feet. The hotel’s music has evolved, looping through itself. Maybe the temperature flux is part of the performance. He’s cold again, shivering, so he throws the sauce-stained coat back over his naked body. The geophage he must have freed from its canister splats to the floor.
He scoops it up, apologizes, cradles it in one arm while he stumbles over to the heating vent. The warm air ripples away his gooseflesh. The geophage squirms, searching for mess. Yorick pats it absently as he stares at the gap between the closet and the cubic nightstand. He pictures Thello crouched there, small and teary-eyed.
He pictures an older Thello diving across the concrete stoop, coming up with the needlegun, taking aim. He can’t remember which hand his brother used to pull the trigger. The memory keeps splintering, reassembling.
There’s a cold weight in his coat pocket. He reaches inside and finds the second bottle from the walking market, still chilled. The prescience astounds him, the prescience of the less-fragmented Yorick who bought it for him, knowing he would need it in this precise slice of time.
It uncaps with a comforting click—
61.1
He is drinking with the geophage, or at least near the geophage. The little vatgrown creature sucks the stains out of his coat while he sits and watches and swills stinging mouthfuls from the bottle. He finished the food before he thought to offer it any. His fingertips are shiny with grease. He is glutted, distended.
“He blew half my fucking head off,” he tells the geophage.
Yorick mimes the act, raising his hand with two fingers forming the blunt mouth of the needlegun. His arm shakes. He sees himself in the smartglass closet again. He remembers the grendel’s limb is boxed up inside it.
“There was a therapy algorithm in the clinic,” he tells the geophage. “They told me to pick a phrase. A verbal anchor. Something to focus on while they put the conduits in.”
His overfull stomach heaves. It’s time to hollow out again, before—
61.3
The world slants on his way to the toilet. He falls. The room hurtles around his head and chyme sloshes in his stomach. Some comes burning up his throat. He swallows hard and lurches back to his feet, unbothered. He is safe here. Insulated. He is a child hiding in the maintenance room, drinking from the bucket.
Yorick kneels on a smooth cold floor. He crawls his hand deep, past his artificial tongue, past the gelflesh that keeps his wound sealed tight. He hits the familiar flap and his gag reflex finally kicks. Slurry gushes out hot, half digested. Wave after wave of it: erupting from his mouth, leaking out his nostrils, aching his ribs and making the incision burn.
He empties out, and for a beautiful moment time runs in reverse. The geophage has followed him to lap up the floor spatter. He watches it work for a while, then sways upright, pedaling the air. He goes to the sinktop to clean his mandible.
He won’t remember tonight, this last night on Ymir, and tomorrow he’ll climb from the wreckage and leave forever. He ducks his head under the cold gush of water. Emerges dripping.
“Practicing for torpor,” he tells the geophage.
He thinks of two children stumbling down a snowy hill, Thello’s buzzing voice: take me with you, take me with you, take me—
61.5
Yorick is stretched out on the floor, back arched, trying to make his spine crack. He can feel air bubbles lurking in cartilage. The geophage has curled up and died. The hotel’s music has gone on too long and begun to cannibalize itself. Its synthesized instruments stutter, disjointed, arrhythmic. The whispering voices sound like people he knows.
“Southern Troglodyte Mezzanine,” he says.
“Good evening, Mister Bellica,” comes the host droid’s voice. “How can I improve your lived experience?”
“Need a car,” he says, sitting upright. “Up north end. To find some doxy.”
“I’m afraid it’s against our policy to provide transportation to this sector of Reconciliation,” the hotel says. “Southern Urbanite Memory prioritizes the safety of our guests.”
“It’s fine, because—” Yorick shuts his eyes, losing the sentence. “It’s fine. It’s company business.” He swallows back an aftersurge of bile. “You know anyone with doxy?”
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t catch that.”
He pries the boots off his feet and carries them to the smartglass closet. He stares at his reflection again. The boot dangling from his fingers becomes a needlegun. Somewhere a company drone snaps its camera shut.
Don’t, Yorick. Don’t fucking do this.
Yorick’s heart strums his ribs. The stoop, the drone, the needlegun. The stoop, the drone, the needlegun. He thought that was going to be his last day on Ymir. It nearly was. He drops the boots and slides the closet open, braced to see the grendel in full, somehow regrown from its severed limb.
All he sees is Gausta’s black box.
61.8
“Sunburned Urbanite Mammary.”
Yorick has wedged himself into the gap between the closet and the nightstand, shoulder blades flush to the wall. He is not sure how long he’s been here. Oily tears keep sliding down his face.
“Yes, Mister Bellica?”
He rubs his head. “Turn off the music, please. And send a droid up with a purge virus. I need to be my—I need to have my faculty. Faculties. More than one.”
“I would be happy to do that for you, Mister Bellica.”
The music ends. The silence pounds.
CHAPTER 62
Southern Urbanite Memory brings him his discreet black phial of purge virus on a mirror-bright tray. The host droid watches while he takes three tries to load the injector. He finally puts it to his neck. Microneedles punch through skin with a metallic whisper.
“We noticed that you are ending your stay with us shortly,” the host droid says. “Southern Urbanite Memory will be very sorry to see you go! Would you be interested in offering feedback on our services?”
Yorick’s head rushes off his shoulders. He sways. “Everything was good.”
“Earlier during your visit, you noted a bad smell in one of our double-luxury suites, room 702. Was that bad smell addressed to your satisfaction?”
Yorick sniffs the air. “Yeah. Think so.”
The host droid dances, delighted. The purge virus kicks and Yorick feels a sick shiver go through his whole body. He barely makes it to the shower before the first wave of byproduct from his deep-cleaned liver and bloodstream lavas out.
“Would you recommend Southern Urbanite Memory to other company employees?” the host droid asks, stopped politely outside the bathroom.
Yorick’s gut is a pressure cooker. He clutches a corroded handgrip on the shower wall, ignoring the chirp of the droid until it wanders out, shutting the door behind it. He lets the purge virus work for a while, rinses himself periodically.
But he knows he can’t be fully sober for this, either. He’ll lose his nerve. He staggers out of the shower and goes to Gausta’s gift.
CHAPTER 63
Grendels have distributed processing, a dozen odd nodes that are in constant flux around the reactor—not unlike the nervous systems of the cleverer cephalopods, the ones the company breeds on some colony worlds for marine work. Humans have an echo of the same in their limbic system, in reflex and instinct.
Yorick feels instinctive now, as he opens the box and pulls out the grendel’s severed limb. The xenocarbon stings his palms. He lays it on the puffy white bed, then hunts his tablet, finds it facedown on the counter. There is a fresh crack in the screen, a Cut in the ice. He forgets dropping it. It’s functional, though, and boots with no issue.
He teases a gossamer thread from the tablet, searches dumbly for a corresponding port on the grendel’s armor. Lets it slither back, and runs a touchless scan instead. He finds the small node midway up the limb. Something is still moving inside, a slow churn of code fed by the last dreg of energy from an absent reactor.
He needs an intermediary, but when he taps into the local net his hounds are gone. He combs the whole Cut for them, not understanding, squinting at the blurry screen. It takes him a full minute to remember that the grendel has been caught. His contract has been completed. The hounds have self-deleted.
They were fully useless down in the tunnel, but he needs them now that there is no rust-red filament to accept or ignore. He needs an interface to access this small near-dormant fragment of machine mind. The hotel net might be enough, but without his hounds he has no way of cutting inside. Southern Urbanite Memory is only so accommodating.
There is one other person who might be able to do it. She fucking hates him.
CHAPTER 64
Yorick only remembers his boots halfway down, so he enters Linka’s bar barefoot, wrapped messily in spiderwool, the grendel’s limb tucked under his armpit. His empty belly is refilling with dread. He dreads speaking to Linka, and he dreads the things he will do to make sure she helps him.
But prying open the node, accessing the buried sliver of the grendel’s mind, is more important than anything else now. It drives him across the darkened bar. His bare feet slap, leaving wet crescents behind. He accidentally stepped in the fourth-floor puddle.
Linka’s frozen arms are where he left them. He sets the grendel’s on the bartop and pulls out a screeching stool. He can feel his pulse under his tattoo.
“I need your help, Linka,” he says. “I know you’re here. You’re always fucking here.”
No answer, no motion.
“I’m sorry for what I said last time. About paying for your transplant. About everyone making their own fuckups. It was stupid.”
Nothing.
“Only two days since that, right?” He climbs carefully onto the stool, stares at the vats. The purge virus has barely finished with him, and he wants a drink. “Mad days, though. Two mad days in the Cut. You and Nocti been alright?”
He leans forward across the bar, willing her to respond, ears strained for her synthesized snarl.
“I need your help,” he repeats. “There’s something I need to see. Something I can’t get out of my own head. I need you to use your neural construct to hook me and this node into the hotel net. Deep as you can.” He pauses at the intersect of two fragile quantum paths. “I know you can do it, Linka. I know you’re the reason the lifts don’t work.”
She bites at last, her electronic voice approximating disdain. “Right. I hate company men so much I hacked the lifts to make them walk.”
“That’s not why.” Yorick puts his hand on the grendel’s limb. “Help me do this, Linka, and you never have to see me again. You and Nocti will forget about me fast.” He takes a slow breath. “If you don’t help me, or if you try to fuck this up for me, the drones and guards outside come crack the lift open.”
“So?” Linka snaps, buzzing.
“So no more lying low for Nocti,” Yorick says. “Except for in a company prison. I don’t want that, so fucking help me.”
Linka doesn’t speak for a long moment. Yorick imagines the dancing synapses in her skull, the face contorting in the dark of the biotank. She knows him well enough to know he’ll do it. She knows he’s a black hole.
“Okay, Yorick,” she says, because she even knows his real name now. “Okay.”
He wanted her to rage at him, curse at him. Her fear makes him feel so sick.
CHAPTER 65
He lies on the bartop with the grendel’s cold limb resting on his chest. Linka’s arms whir around him, over him, trailing electrode cables. She tethers his scalp to her biotank, tethers her biotank to the grendel’s sluggish node. They become a trinity.
“The hotel’s going to notice this,” Linka says flatly. “What I did, my blind spot, I did that slow. Took six fucking months. I made sure I didn’t wake up any subsystems, made sure I covered my tracks.” One arm above his head helps another switch manipulators, go from a gripping claw to a microtool. “This isn’t like that. This is a deep hack all at once. It’ll trigger countermeasures.”
Yorick adjusts the spiderwool clinging to his groin. “I’ll be quick.”
“You’ll have to be.” Linka’s arms pause. Shiver. “Okay. Ready. I’m plugging you in.”
A firework detonates behind Yorick’s eyes and his whole body spasms. His back arches. Finally cracks. Then his body is gone, and he’s seeing through Linka’s eyes, through her many arms. Hyperreal textures in panorama: the foam topping the vats becomes a cumulus cloudscape, the bartop is an endless gray plane. His foot rises off it like a sheer cliff.
For a nanosecond he sees through her other cams, too, sees not just the bar and lobby but slices from all over the hotel and even outside it, all the cams she’s managed to pirate or rig up on her own. He catches a glimpse of a familiar figure clad in a black body glove.
Then it falls away, and he’s drifting in an electric sea. Southern Urbanite Memory churns all around him, its behavioral loops and processing patterns, its guest data and infrastructure. He sees an echo of simplistic machine pleasure from positive customer feedback, Oxo Bellica, room 702. He sees the wandering host droids as fingers tapping out a listless rhythm.
Something else is in here with him, another intruder. Yorick turns his un-head. The fragment of the grendel is now a swirl of foreign code, shifting, mutating. Not so unlike its corporeal self. It stretches its digital tendrils, maybe by reflex, sampling a swathe of the hotel’s data. Its movements are sluggish, clumsy.
The tendrils retreat as Yorick approaches. “It’s me,” he says, knowing he might be talking to nobody, knowing this fragment might be nowhere near sentient. “I need you to show me something.” He tries to crouch on un-legs, make himself smaller, slower. He doesn’t want to trigger any shadows of the reflex that killed four miners. “You’ve been in Thello’s head.”
The fragment ripples. Yorick hopes it’s recognition.
“I need you to show me the day I lost my jaw,” he says, and far away he feels his heartbeat accelerate. “Not my memory. His. Show me the stoop. The drone. The needlegun.”
He extends his un-hand, remembering how the grendel offered its filament. The fragment doesn’t move. Doesn’t respond. Maybe doesn’t understand. There’s no time to make it, so with only a small pang of guilt, Yorick digs his way inside.
CHAPTER -5 (V2)
A wasp is crawling along the concrete floor of the apartment. One of its wings is torn off. The other strums furiously, uselessly; the meaty buzzing noise makes Thello flinch. He tries to hide it, because Yorick is crouched beside him and Yorick never flinches.
