Jack pushed, and he busted the best lock in a hundred districts. The arc in his hands spread through the mechanical cylinders, forcing them open. His leather-gloved grip on molded steel was steady as the barrel liquified and reformed, coursing into layer after layer of spring bolts. It condensed, firm, six inches into the wan metal, and the buzzing against his palm stopped. Jack twisted with all the torque he could muster, jamming the L-shaped handle sideways.
The midnight hour’s darkness concealed his progress from sight, but he made do with sound. Click after click rewarded his efforts. The circular patterns around the lock spiraled into themselves, and the double doors which held them. No deadbolt, then. Jack yanked the arc’s handle, hard, then stepped through the narrow opening. It was the most useful thing he’d ever worked with, but it only functioned once. It was fused to the structure it opened. He couldn’t put it in his pack and take it with him. Instead, he turned back to it and shook off his right glove.
Jack ran the brass-lined fingertips of his good hand over the lock’s interior. The surface was warm, riddled with intricate inscriptions down its surface. There was a long moment, the clock still ticking, before he could tear himself away. He replaced the glove, finally, sliding it over his bare, bracketed fingers. He raised his hand to his mouth, then, and clamped his teeth down on the thick lining at the wrist. A sharp tug, leveraging the muscles in his neck, and the glove was forced back over his palm. He massaged his left shoulder, the arm limp, and soldiered onward.
“All of it,” Jack said.
Prom sipped his drink. “Eventually, yes.”
Jack put his head in his hands. The leather was cool against his face; his right glove was wet with condensation. “You will be part of a greater conflict, if you choose,” Prom said. “You must be unnoticed, for the programmers’ and the players’ sakes. But you will make the difference.”
No and yes, Jack wanted to answer, but the bar was gone, folded back into the last day’s memories, the most vivid parts bursting out into replays he couldn’t seem to cease. His head hurt. His arm hurt. Always, in the background, a ripped-up ribbon of the previous twenty-four hours that wouldn’t fully enter his conscious mind. The parts he fixated on, those came to the fore, patching themselves together into snippets of seconds or minutes. Never hours. Everything else was gone, bubbling deep and irretrievable, just as the rest of him burned with dull conviction.
It had started with a year; it was a day now, and somewhere in between it had been months or weeks. It would be less, soon. Jack kept moving.
The complex was deep, but it was unpatrolled. He wasn’t supposed to be here, but it wasn’t a place anyone was meant to enter. There were no lights save those he’d brought himself, and he was no longer underneath the moon, but blundering forward into pitch black. The shadows never coalesced into the shape of armored guards, or the drones of far-off countries, and still Jack startled at every breath of air.
“We control Gifu,” Prom said. “Painstakingly, we have carved out a section of Japan and preserved it, free from the rule of the Yakuza or the pressure of its fractured government. Those rivals cannot abide us. They see us as an infection, and they would crush us with the screams of millions.”
He was being stupid, just as he had been sentimental before. He turned on his headlamp, and the industrial bulb illuminated near to as far as he could see. He realized his mistake a second late, and closed his eyes just as the contrast would have blinded him. He waited a moment to adjust, opened them again, slowly, acclimating to the sudden brightness. All around him there was an arch of plate-thick glass; behind it were tremendous, polished metal fans. They churned in a noiseless fury.
Jack looked over his shoulder, towards the way he’d come, and for the first time the enormity of his project sunk in. He’d been walking for minutes along a smooth path worn by wheel tracks into a building of endless machinery, all in a straight line. The door he’d come through was a sliver, a crack of moonlight under a network of transparent tubes bigger than any he’d ever seen. A half-million angel-hairs funneled out into the night through tiny pinpricks, snaking throughout the prefecture, and he had the audacity— His knees buckled.
“I need you for this,” Prom said.
He scooted his stool a little closer to Jack’s. In the process, an ice water slid along the bar. Prom smiled at his own sleight-of-hand. Across the bar, their bartender for the evening swiveled to the dash, the gears in his torso grinding, and pressed a series of buttons. He’d introduced himself as Russ, which meant either Serbia or the Russian states. Probably the latter. Jack didn’t care to dwell on it.
Above the body Russ piloted, a series of lights flickered. Yet another scan registered across the bar, highlighting chemical impurities. Sticker’s was as clean as restaurants got, not despite the bar’s criminal element, but because of it, to allow it to flourish without interruption. There was a bright flash in one booth. Jack caught it out of the corner of his eye. None in his drink, which was the important thing. He relaxed and lifted the glass. Even through the glove, the condensation was chilly.
“Cheers.” Jack drank.
Prom took a long, slow sip of his own amber-colored drink, then produced a lighter from the inside of his army jacket’s sleeve. His other hand dipped through the buttoned front, into the pockets concealed within the green fabric, and came out with a carton of cigarettes. Again, Russ pressed the buttons. Again, the scan revealed nothing harmful. Not as its primary effect, in any case.
“I’ll rephrase,” Prom said. “I’d like you to do it. You don’t have to. I can find someone else.” He held out a cigarette.
“I’m alright,” Jack said.
Puffs of smoke accompanied Prom’s next words. “Fair enough; see, I’d rather not. Find someone else, that is. It’s not easy.”
Jack finished his water. “Because—?”
“Because of this.” Prom tapped the empty glass. The ice cubes rattled. “Gifu is falling apart. Didn’t fare well. You know the statistics. You are a rare intersection. This makes you useful.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Yes,” Prom said. “You don’t use any type of psychoactive chemical. This, already, is very rare.”
Jack could guess. “I’m talented.”
“Talent is less important,” Prom said. “Your pliability is. Detective. Injured. Put back together, but no better than. Allergic. Medicine destroys you. Drugs worse. Almost untouched. This meeting pays for what? More surgery? You fix yourself, then you fix the city?”
Jack lurched, and his gloves slid down the slick glass. He collapsed to the floor, twisting to land on his right arm. The blow hurt less. It still hurt a great deal. He was spiraling, now, reverting in each cycle to the focal point of his regret. His intention bound him to the recollection; the drive of the endeavour returned him over and over.
He pressed against the glass, leveraging himself upwards with the friction, and brought himself to his feet. Eddies would carry him back into the past, Prom had said, but they would ebb closer and closer to the present. He stumbled forward through the compound along its service path. There was a streak of sweat where he’d fallen against the glass, shining in his headlamp’s light, but he disregarded it.
A robot should have come to clean it; in the first place, in fact, he never should have gained access. There should have been sentries out in the front, security forces standing guard. There should have been maintenance drones making fixes throughout the canyon of fans, flashing precise, calibrated beams for scans and ultraviolet scours. There were none. He was alone, and there was no one here to help him.
“It’s an implant,” Prom said. “An artificial intelligence.”
Jack frowned. “Like the trains.”
“Exactly like the trains. They run autonomous, regulated by people of no regard, themselves controlled by people far more powerful than I, and so on. Limited functionality, but they can perform any task within their domain. More than that, they coordinate perfectly throughout the network.”
“What’s this, then?” Jack asked. “A chip?”
“It’s a chip, yes,” Prom said. “A salvaged copy of a decommissioned program.”
“Do you have more?”
“Many,” Prom assured him, “But only one try per person, and only one try at using it.”
“Why, and why?”
The glass around Jack was stained with soot and dirt. He’d tried to scrub off the thick coating, to get a sense of how far he’d made it, but the grime wasn’t on his side. The air he was breathing now wasn’t clean, by any stretch, but it was normal. The air the mechanisms pumped was choked with all they were supposed to have refined out.
The fans here were slower, from what he had made out before the dirt settled too thick to see through. Smaller, too, with boxy filters in between them. Those devices strained, here. At the opposite end of the tunnel, thick, black smog would belch out into the sky through thousands more miniscule, choked tubes. Gifu’s air was turning toxic, roiling clouds of manufactured smoke.
Jack walked forward, still, always forward despite his stumbles, as the plant around him stilled into layers of shadow. The prefecture was to be allowed to die, writhing in the strangled screams of its own bellows. He could not let it happen.
“You take this,” Prom said. He held a small, shimmering pill between his thumb and forefinger. “Your bloodstream is unscathed. On anyone else, the amplifications are poison. Not for you, with your unendurable mutations. For you—”
“It’ll work?”
“We don’t know. But we can try.”
“Who’s we?” Jack asked.
His muscles tensed —his left arm spasmed slightly— and his eyes flit to the mirrored surfaces behind the bar: bottles, Russ’s cocktail equipment, Russ himself. Sticker’s was empty, but for the back rooms and those booths tucked tactfully out of Russ’s eyeline.
If Prom cared to do something —if he had, already— then Jack was done for. It dawned on him that they both knew this, and he calmed. There was no reason for Prom to hurry, if he were to try something. He might as well take his time.
“I am powerful,” Prom said. “You know this. You are scared, perhaps. No reason. Here, we are in alignment. I aim to make you more powerful, so that you may serve our common interest. No point, wasting resources, if you refuse this power.”
Jack nodded.
“We are a number of prominent individuals in this prefecture concerned with its well-being. You will note that I alone, of the candidates you may be considering, speak English. I am the one making this proposal to you. This is no accident.”
Jack arrived at the end of the passage. His memory was collapsing into the integration, and all he could remember was how it was meant to happen. He looked up at the room reserved for management, charged with the plant’s preservation. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open. Men sat slumped in their chairs before multicolored buttons and readouts of fuliginous concentrations.
He took a deep breath. The air was fine here, or no worse. They had been killed, and left to rot amongst the decaying, sabotaged systems. Arrogance, to leave the compound in partial operation, waiting for it to run down, but it was subtle. Equipment failure, plausibly deniable. No one would realize until it was too late to leave. And once they were all sick and dying— well, then someone would notice, surely, and by the time they died it would be fixed.
It pained him —his head split further— but pulled off his pack of books and tools and set it down beside a console. One-armed, he forced a corpse out of its chair and sat down to work. Speak of the trees, he thought, and surrendered himself.
Prom set the pill down on the bar, and Russ poured Jack another drink of water.