Tidelands: I-Seven (14)
Smack Jack. Stegrun.
They follow the drone back in silence, both – for their different reasons – deep in thought.
For Squirrel’s part, outside of the confirmation of her worst fears, something else has begun to nag at her: How is Denton so sure of her abilities?
As he’d said, these are serious people, too serious to mess around with betting on just a hunch, to be so cavalier – not like Denton at all, in fact. He would want more proof than that, wouldn’t he?
Her mind floats back again to Lily. She’d been the first one to tell her about Naturals, to explain what they were. But how had the subject even come up?
And obediently, that memory now begins to resurface too.
They’d been playing something – hadn’t they? Some sort of card game. A gang of them: herself, Lily, even Grocers, all laughing, shouting. That’s right! It was Grocers, in fact, who’d kept getting the rules wrong, or was just losing all the time, and having to get punished. It was called something stupid, Smack Jack, something like that, where you actually got to hit the loser – only a dead arm or a leg, but you lost enough times and you knew about it. And when Squirrel herself started to lose, and kept getting smacked, her hand full of diamonds and clubs and hearts when spades were trumps, she’d turned to Grocers’ mocking laughter and said, “How come you got all those spades anyway?”
But there had been no way for her to know that, Grocers’ cards being flat on the table on account of him being convinced that his losing streak was because everyone else was cheating, and a weird look had come onto Lily’s face. And later on that evening – almost sadly, she now recalls – Lilly had told her all about Naturals.
But that wasn’t all, and now she thinks about it, there were other times where things had happened too, times before Lily had gone away. Times where Lily would be looking for something – a hair clasp, a shoe – and Squirrel would just show up with it in her hand, like it was only natural she should know what Lily was looking for, and exactly where to find it.
So had Lily told Denton about those other times too? Had he told her about what had happened in the Den’s kitchen, and she’d volunteered her own corroboration?
Abashed by the memory perhaps, Lily’s unquiet spirit does not show up to settle the matter, either to deny or confirm.
“Remember,” says Denton, “it’s just nobbling the jockey. Just distract him, that’s all. Easy.”
But Squirrel is now more than a little distracted herself, by the undesirable consequences of either of the outcomes she’s faced with, where success or failure will greet a similarly undesirable fate.
“Why don’t you have a wander?” he says, as if sensing some of this. “Get your head straight? We’ve got time.”
And so now here she is, having happened in her wanderings upon some sort of travelling virtual exhibit burrowed away behind the back of the stands, a history of the Bouts, affording a geek-out for the diehards and nostalgia for the long-in-tooth. There are a few other patrons, most tuned in to some narration that she’s opted out of, but at least the place is quiet, provided with its own dampening field against the exterior tumult to ensure a museum-like peace. She strolls desultorily past the offerings – something she would normally be fascinated by – an interactive hall of fame, celebrating the notorious and the renowned, with names like Nemesaur, The Kraken, Frankenbear, each with their own accompanying little animated holograms. There’s also a little gaming tank where you can play them – just like Fogler’s – two little panting figures stood ready to battle to the death (well, to the point where they can’t continue – for “death” here means no more than a time-out, a temporary lull, in which to be stretchered off to be patched back together, stapled and stitched, ready to fight another day).
Could she make a run for it? Prompted by this possibility she glances back, expecting to see Grocers and Barnaby behind her, flanking her at either side, ready with a scowl or an obscene gurn, and for a moment her heart skips a hopeful beat to discover herself unattended – before spying a tiny bird-like motion above her: another drone, no doubt courtesy of her new friend in the eyrie, and probably not the only one. Escape is the least likely option.
She emerges from the quiet of the exhibit into a sea of noise. The mood is vamping up again – music, chanting, songs, taunts and gibes, for and against Champ or Contender, pass back and fore between opposing supporters, dyed-in-the-wool seen-it-alls or first-timers turned partisan for the night; even some sort of Mexican wave rippling through the crowd. But it all has the opposite effect on her mood, and she steers further from the hubbub, out along the underside of the stands, where a quieter sort of patron is engaging in more private forms of sensory diversion.
Head down, her eyes following her feet, into her morose meditations rolls a metallic, football-sized object that comes to a stop right in front of her, its casing cracked and dented, revealing fitfully sparking innards. It’s a drone – or until recently was.
“I fucking told him we shoulda given it more.”
The air has rent in front of her and a man is edging out backward through a door-like rectangle, muttering sourly to himself, a giant sparking cotton bud brandished defensively back into the invisible space from which he has emerged. It is one of the pole-men. She looks vertically upward, a sudden realisation, confirming above her the viewing platform from which she has recently descended. This must be the stables.
A deafening crash erupts from whatever space the rectangle accesses.
“For fuck’s sake, Tony! Give it the fucking—”
Another crash, and the man ducks for cover, in the process spotting Squirrel.
“What you doing back here?” His eyes flit briefly back inside the door. “You better make yourself scarce, love. I fucking told him we shoulda—”
But the repetition of this already overheard piece of advice is never completed as a large wooden crate bowls through the gap, smacking the man off his feet and propelling him out into the dunes, robbing him of more than just the end of his sentence.
She follows the shouts from inside, gingerly edging into smokey, ill-lit and noisy confusion, a roiling mess of noxious heat and shifting shadowy forms.
She hears it before she sees it: a deep thump, followed by a now-familiar resonant groan. She rounds the corner of a stack of crates similar to the one that’s just flattened the pole-man, coming face-to-face with more wreckage and toppled destruction, the corner of some collapsing structure leaning in a semi-disarray of slanted timbers and mounds of rubble.
But not in fact a structure – for then it moves.
The form raises its head out of shadow, and lit from above by the lurid arc lights she sees twin glistening trails of snot crawling down its top lip with that tell-tale violet fluorescence: the drug in its system, Haze – not enough, in the former pole-man’s opinion, but it must be a delicate balance, necessary sedation vying with capacity for compliance with its violent duties. But over the years, like Denton had said, it would have built up a tolerance, following the addict’s predictable curve of diminishing returns, becoming accustomed to its ever increasing dose.
Another crate, grasped and hurled, hurtles toward her, and she screams, a high and involuntary shriek, diving to her right to evade the fate of another pole-man stood next to her, some yards in front; closer, slower to react, the crate plucks him from his rooted stance, carrying him swiftly with it out into the darkness behind her. Like it’s a game of skittles. She pushes herself up onto her knees from where her evasive dive has dumped her, and looks up.
It is staring at her, her blue-eyed boy, its patterned skin fluorescing a furious cobalt. It is risen to one knee, tilting its head, dog-like – at her scream, she realises. And as she meets its curious, almost puzzled look, she connects.
She had known that there was mind there, that first time she saw it, and now – for the first time in its life – that mind is known, and knows itself known. As with Denton and the others before, she sees and feels her way, learning to navigate, assembling the narrative of its fractured dream of a life, each fragment giving up piecemeal knowledge of its sorry genesis.
It could have been a boy once, a foundling like herself, fostered in the orphanages or lost to the Dens, a functionary in the chop-shops, a hack-shack drone. But in vivo, men had taken it, bribing and relieving its addict soon-to-be mother of her unplanned burden; in vitro, they had bathed it, swaddled it in blankets of wires and tubes, setting it down to sleep in a dreamless chemical cocoon. There, it had been spliced, morphing as it grew, full-fast-forward in their hormonal hothouse, its bio-kernel of genetic code tweaked and transcended by techniques years in perfection along a path strewn with the lessons of numberless learned-from failures. And as it grew, they had nourished it with their own dreams, fed it feral fables, tutoring its instincts to vamp up its aggression to a white-hot fury, in a school of virtual violence without home-bell or break.
And when it was done, when they had finished crafting this blind instrument of rage, they consoled themselves with things they could not know: that it was unthinking, unfeeling, a creature of mere unconscious reflex and instinctual drives; its primitive, vestigial consciousness, that of a rodent or a bird; and declared it ready for the Bouts. Ready for tour-seasoned professionals with sponsorship deals, for hot-shot kids with skills honed on home-consoles and gaming tanks, safe in their booths outside the arena, suspended in harnesses and gimp suits, to spark up the neural jacks, engage the battle circuits and deliver a spectacle of conscienceless abandon from which – sickened or enthralled – it was hard to turn away.
Outside of the arenas, they would revert again to instinctive automata – eating, pissing and shitting, freely as cows, wherever they stood or sat. Like sleepwalkers, like dreamers, restlessly shifting, groaning, yelling, lashing out and drunkenly lurching, prompting their trainers to deploy the sole all-purpose hypnotically embedded command – to keep still, to be quiet, to prepare themselves for battle: “Stand ground”.
And it was through this, unknown to his masters, but clear now to Squirrel, that he had begun to think of himself; as something more than meat; as something – misheard, malformed, misunderstood, fashioning selfhood from the very tools that denied it; as a name: Stegrun. And looking now into his eyes she sees what everyone else has not: the wordless yearning for something more, for somewhere other, a longing all cobbled together – from sky and stars, the smell of sea, a glimpse of light through half-open cage. And she knows.
It wants to be free.
She begins to walk toward him, herself driven on by pure impulse. What does she have to lose?
The remaining pole-men do nothing to stop her as she moves between them, too immobilised by their own embedded protocols of fear and astonishment. Stegrun watches her cautious approach, meeting her gaze, her thoughts and feelings now intertwined with his, shaping, clearing, reaffirming his burgeoning intent. And slowly, responding to the mental images she gives him – realising she must communicate in pictures, not words or concepts – he lowers the flat of one enormous palm for her, and tentatively she begins to scale the tree-trunk arm, picking her way nimbly, like her namesake, along the mountainous bicep and up onto his left shoulder, using the scarred and ridged skin for purchase, to cling to the harness around the back of his neck, that hangs like a horse’s bridle next to the blood-tipped neural jacks, dislodged and swinging free.
They don’t have long. Someone or -thing by now will have raised the alarm. The last of the pole-men are already beginning to rouse from their temporary stupor, retreating outside to call for reinforcements – more men, drones, robots, God knows what else. A forlorn, a futile gesture, then, but at least one freely chosen. And so, slowly and deliberately, for the first and perhaps its last time – his mind a whirl of sea and sky and stars and open doors – Stegrun rises to his feet and stands.
Squirrel looks up towards the eyrie.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.