Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (14 page)

I looked up at the Techie with the glasses to see if he’d disappeared, too. He was looking down at me, one eyebrow raised in a question. I stared at him for a moment and then shut my eyes, anger and pain filling me up, making me vibrate with the need to hit someone, to strangle someone, to kill and just keep killing. I knew Remy was dead. Remy was a bloated corpse on the floor next to Belling in Mexico City, and I’d failed, again, to keep a single person alive. And I’d kidded myself that I was off the Rail, that I was calling my own shots.

Despair was like anesthetic sweeping through me. My hands shook violently, fluttering like strangled bugs.

I remembered, suddenly, being on the truck after being pressed, me and Remy and half the town. Remy up for it, helpg me take on the single guard—and we had him. We could have walked away. I saw his face—young and happy. Trusting. The fucking kid had
trusted
me.

Filled with a formless, blank rage, I looked at the Techie. “Hello, Grisha,” I said, my voice surprisingly calm. “Don’t untie me. I might fucking kill you.”

MAKES ME WANT TO BE A BETTER PERSON

“He’s got to be the most powerful Psionic on record,” Grisha said, flicking his cigarette onto the floor as he knelt down to peer into the cage. “Certainly the most powerful I’ve ever encountered.” He paused for a second. “It is good to see you, Avery.”

I nodded absently, staring at the gnarled old man in the cage, too, thinking about Remy. Grisha had refused my advice and untied me. I tried to picture the body I’d left back in Mexico City in Belling’s room. I remembered stepping over it, not even glancing down to see who’d been killed. I pictured Remy lying there,
still
there. As I pictured him, I saw Kev Gatz, gutshot, dead underneath Westminster Abbey. Then I saw R.A. Harper, staring at me after Belling slit her throat. Then Gleason, swollen and blackened, animated by Ty Keith’s nanobots. I saw them all, everyone, dozens and dozens of them—people I’d tried to spare, to protect, to merely leave behind. Every fucking one of them, dead.

“I am sorry. This is a shock.” He paused to cough, hard, into one hand, his face reddening. “But we must speak. There is much to discuss that involves you.”

“Fuck you,” I said leisurely. Grisha was barely there. In some small sliver of my brain, I wondered that he was here, that he was still alive. It was distant and vague, though, and I felt no urgency in exploring the event.

The little man in the cage stared back at me with slitted, yellowed eyes. He was about a thousand years old, and they looked like hard years. The malevolence he projected at me was like a physical sensation, and I wondered if maybe Grish was wrong about his little cage, if maybe it wasn’t one hundred percent effective. He had a round head like a rotten potato, off of which his face hung in heavy white-whiskered folds like it had become detached from the bones and tendons beneath it. His nose had been broken several times and never set, his ears were red flowers blooming from the dirty, encrusted folds of his skull, his suit had once been purple and was now just dirty, and his hands were tiny, tiny things with thick sausage fingers that looked useless for anything more subtle than holding your prick while you pissed.

As we stared at each other, he spat delicately onto the floor of his cage without taking his eyes off me.

Grisha stepped over to the cage and leaned down to put his face near the old man’s. “What I would like to know first,” the Techie said in a wondering voice, “is why not simply
Push
Avery into helping you?”

The old man slid his eyes to Grisha and worked his lips like his teeth were sliding out of his head. He affected a stoic, calm expression, but something about the way face never stopped moving, never stopped sucking at itself told me he was terrified.

“Can’t,” he suddenly growled, his voice deep and scratchy, like he’d swallowed razors. “We tried. A lot, in the field. Motherfucker doesn’t take Push well. You can do it, but it ain’t easy, and keepin’ it up long is fucking impossible. All those
others
in his head; you’d haveta Push ’em all, simultaneously.” He spat again. “But he’s susceptible to
suggestion
. Takes a light touch. Subtle. Gotta get in there and really work it. Y’can fool the
eyes
, and then he sort of Pushes
himself
, see.”

“Why?” I asked, standing up. “Why Remy?”

The old man just stared at me, his tiny eyes following me.

“Forgive me for putting it in this way, Avery,” Grisha said seriously. “But he was incidental. This Psionic wished to stay close to you. This was expedient.”

“Expedient.” I wondered, for a second, about the mysterious man in the white suit. A prop, I figured. To make it convincing. One more person killed on my account. I crouched down to peer between the bars of the cage. “Let him out.” I made fists until my knuckles popped, and my HUD snapped into razor-sharp clarity.

“No,” Grisha said. “Avery, if we release him from the device, he will immediately be able to compel us with his ability. Come, let us talk in the other room.”

“Fuck you,” I repeated. “Let him out.” I closed my eyes. “If he can stop me from squeezing the fucking life out of him with my bare hands, he deserves to live.”

I heard the skinny Russian bastard crouch down next to me. When he spoke, it was right into my ear. His breath smelled like cigarettes and rot. “Avery, I am sorry you have lost your friend in this way. This… Pusher wished to have access to you on a continuous basis in order to have time to dig into your psyche gently, without being noticed. For his own reasons he decided that assuming the identity of your friend was the easiest way to do so. This obviously worked. It would have continued to work if not for our intervention.” He put his hand on my shoulder and I twitched, controlling myself with effort. “There is a war going on, Avery, and you are a battlefield. Come, let us talk.”

“No,” I said, opening my eyes and finding the fucking codger still staring at me, his mouth working like he was chewing cud. I realized I could hear his labored breathing. “I don’t care about anything aside from strangling this piece of shit. Take your war outside, Grisha.”

He sighed, and the patience in his exhalation made me want to smack him. From what I remembered about Grisha, the blow might not land. “Avery, for all his power, this piece of shit is just a soldier. The Angels. You know of them.”

I nodded once. “Yes.”

“You can kill him. They will send another. They will be less subtle. Less gentle. Eventually they will pop your mind open like a legume and scoop you out, sift through the scattered thoughts.” He leaned in again, close to my ear. “This is not the man to kill. This is simply a tool used against you.”

Suddenly I was very tired and just wanted to be left alone to gnaw over that day. I should have known something was wonky, that something was off. I’d been knocked over the head and when I’d come to, a dead body, Belling dead, and Remy not quite right. He hadn’t been right, and I hadn’t noticed, or I’d been forced not to notice. Either way, he was dead, and I kept hearing him in Hong Kong:
You left me. You fucking left me
. I might as well have killed him myself back in Englewood, before we got pressed, for all the good I’d done him.

I let Grisha urge me to my feet and lead me out of the room. I turned in the doorway and looked back to find the short little bastard still staring at me.

The next room was the same size: long and narrow, claustrophobic. The walls weren’t as covered by endless banks of electronic equipment, and were a rusty-colored corrugated metal; I realized we were in a series of old shipping containers that had been welded together into a structure. It was hot, and Grisha’s fellow SPS members looked sweaty and sad in their grubby jumpsuits, sitting around an eroded wooden table that left barely enough room for people to squeeze past.

The skinny Indian immediately offered me a metal cup filled with something that I assumed was supposed to be coffee, and for a second I forgot everything else and missed the System, the good old System of Federated Nations, with a passion. It had been fucked up and dangerous and I’d done my part to tear it down, but fuck, you could get a decent cup of coffee and a real cigarette back then.

As if reading my mind, the Indian followed the coffee with a burning cigarette. I took it with numb fingers, then watched Grisha as he moved toward a white porcelain urn sitting on a simple battery-powered burner.

“So, why?” I asked thickly. All my instant anger had melted away, and I just felt tired and beaten. I’d been swimming against currents for years, and the cosmos kept ducking my head under the waves.

Grisha poured himself some coffee and then turned, gesturing to an empty chair. I ignored him and sniffed at the coffee. I needed to know who I had to blame for Remy, who I had to go kill, and I could tell Grisha wasn’t going to tell me unless I let him ramble out his whole story. And Grish was one of those oddball Techies you couldn’t twist it out of. Not easily, anyway.

He sighed and leaned against the wall next to the coffee urn. I was aware of four faces on me, studying me, and I resisted the urge to look at the Indian to see if he had that black rod in his hand, if he was going to make sure I didn’t misbehave.

“Our purpose, Avery, is not simply to build such fine quarters for ourselves and create toys,” he began, sipping coffee and making a face. “We are a voluntary organization, and we are trying to preserve technology. These are new dark ages, yes? Civil war, the erosion of authority, the breakup of the System, Marin’s destruction—you have seen the state of the world. Chaos. Fragmented culture. The complete collapse of the manufacturing base, which had been too heavily centralized and fragile under the undersecretaries. All it took was destabilization of one aspect of the chain and everything comes down, yes?”

I nodded vaguely. “It’s a fucking shit stom out there, sure.”

Grisha smiled. “Yes, apt: shit storm.” He shrugged. “We are here to save what can be saved, in hope that when the world stabilizes again we will not have to rediscover everything, yes? But it is not just technology we find ourselves protecting, seeking.” He paused and looked around at his fellow Techies. “Avery, do you know when the last live human birth was?”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“The last time someone had a baby,” he added through a spasm of damp-sounding coughs. “That lived.”

I frowned over my mug, which smelled like something you’d describe as coffee if you’d never smelled coffee before in your life. “You mean aside from me?”

It was an automatic joke. I didn’t know why I’d said it, or where it had come from.

Grisha smiled. “Six years ago. This is the last confirmed live birth in
the world
, Avery. It is possible, of course,” he continued with a wave, “that due to the breakdown of communication lines and scientific work that we have merely
missed
every report and simply not observed the teeming thousands of newborns mewling everywhere. But it is more likely that for some reason, as yet unexplained, the human race has simply gone sterile.”

I thought back over the last few years. A lot of my attention had been taken up with not being shot in the face, but I could not recall any young children. No one under six, that was certain—plenty of dirty-faced preteens itching to steal your wallet or swarm you in an alley. Yeah, plenty of dirty-faced moppets like Adora’s sister, learning to drink at nine and looking fifty by the time they were thirteen, sure. But no babies.

Then I remembered Remy, and stopped caring. There was a boulder jammed in my chest, blocking every thought and making my head throb with ebbing blood.

“Dying. We are dying, as a
race
, Avery. As an organization, SPS is split in its preferred response to this crisis. Some feel we should be putting our dwindling resources into trying to solve the problem. I and others believe that time has past, and we are seeking to salvage what we can.”

I let my eyes crawl around the interior of the container, feeling tight and buried, cooking alive inside this metal box, with Grisha’s calm, jolly voice droning on and on. I needed one fucking piece of information from him: Where to go, who to hunt, who was responsible for Remy. I wanted to launch myself across their stupid fucking salvage table and toss my hot coffee in his eyes and push the cigarette into his forehead until he squealed, then ask him politely what I needed to know. Except Grisha wouldn’t squeal, and his three friends would pull me off him, and then I’d find myself tied down to a gurney again.

So I listened.

“We are sadly reduced. We cannot fabricate things. We are forced to work with whatever we find—components that can be cannibalized, re-used, re-programmed. We are good at this. But we have no more capability of genetic research, of even primitive reproductive science beyond forced breeding—which was, I am ashamed to say, seriously considered. But we are facing textinction of the human race. Any possible escape route must be considered.”

Aside from the table and the coffee, the room was filled with crates with obscure labels. Some of them had been torn open, a yellow fuzz of packing material spilling out like guts, looking scratchy and hot. On the other side of the table was another door, tightly shut and barred on the inside, and off to the side in the dark corner was a tall, narrow crate, on which sat my Roon and three spare clips.

“Happily—though we are not unanimous on the happiness of this thought, I confess—this world is littered with technology we might use to preserve the intellect and culture of the remaining humans, such as it is. Happily, we do already have a great number of high-quality intelligences filed.”

Reminding myself not to stare at things you wanted, I dragged my eyes back to Grisha. It was remarkable how unchanged he was. Face still narrow, eyes cheerful, stupid fucking glasses. “Filed?” I asked, feeling dumb and slow.

“Avatars, Avery. The human race is slipping into the dark night, yes? One day the last of us dies, what is left? We can digitize intelligences, but someone must be out and about, for maintenance. We had designed our world for arms and legs; we must have them. Avatars, Avery. The whole world is
littered
with avatar shells, most damaged, but many usable with some repair. The civil war left us with a supply, you see. We have been collecting them, preparing the way. Most are simply irradiated, which will not matter once the rest of us are all dead!” He shrugged, planting the cigarette back in his mouth and toasting me with his coffee. “As we die, we process people, and at least there is a remnant of us to carry on.” He shrugged his eyebrows. “Also, we can choose who to salvage and who not. Leave the bastards responsible for the mess behind.”