Hammerjack Read online

  Cray turned back toward her. “They make you do the same?”

  “Nobody makes me do anything, Dr. Alden.”

  Avalon walked past him, down a narrow gangway that wound its way to a control bunker for the cryofacility. As Cray followed, the nagging sliver of paranoia he had brought with him from the hotel began to rub him raw. He knew about Yakuza culture—he had seen more than his fair share of it in the Zone—and was aware of how those tentacles reached into the corporate world. It was why companies kept old bangers like Phao Yin around. But Cray had never imagined blood oaths taken in the boardroom.

  That left him in a dangerous position. Cray was hardly a made man—and now he knew the Collective’s most guarded secret. They were bound to take steps to ensure that information never made it out to the street. The Yakuza were obligated.

  Cray wished he had never come here.

  A spiral staircase at the end of the gangway led down to the bunker. Sentry cameras followed Cray the entire way, laser range finders mapping the contours of his body for identification, comparison, and tracking. By the time he reached bottom, the computer had created a precise mathematical representation of him. From here on in, he was alive only as long as that construct remained active. If the computer determined he was a threat and terminated it, his death would follow a short instant later.

  Entry to the control bunker was less sophisticated. Avalon simply knocked on the titanium alloy door and waited for someone inside to open it.

  One of the technicians—a tall, gangly man with pasty skin—answered. His eyes had the dazed, detached expression of a person more accustomed to dealing with machines than people. He did, however, know Avalon.

  “I thought you were kidding,” the man grumbled, glancing over her shoulder at Cray. “This is the hotshot everyone’s been talking about?”

  “Evan,” Avalon said, “this is Dr. Alden.”

  Evan stifled her with a wave of his hand. “The less I know about him the better,” he shot back. “Just get him in here so I can get the prep work done. We’re already behind schedule.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Cray said. “What exactly does he have in mind?”

  “He’s granting your request to meet with the Assembly.”

  “What’s he going to do? Thaw them out?”

  “No,” she answered. “He’s going to make a map of your mind.”

  Evan hunched over the only virtual terminal in the control bunker, bony fingers moving across the input interface in a blur. The display showed a pair of EEG lines moving in almost perfect concert with each other. It was when they diverged—even in the slightest—that he showed his disgust with an irritated sigh.

  “Tell him to try it again,” he said to Avalon.

  “I heard you,” Cray spat back, already tired of the procedure. It was better than a direct interface, but not by much. “Just shut up long enough for me to get a little focus.”

  He was laid out on a probe table, the top half of his skull under an electrochemical resonance imager. Evan transmitted a random series of three-dimensional images into the ERI, each time measuring Cray’s response to them. He then painstakingly traced the neural pathways in the cognizant areas of Cray’s brain, trying to match those impulses with the artificial ones generated by the Assembly’s imaging system. The technology was old—there had been little use for neural imaging since direct interface had become a working reality—but at least it was noninvasive.

  “Okay,” Evan said, letting the lines play themselves out for a few more seconds. He didn’t sound at all satisfied—only resigned that this was as good as it would get. “It’s borderline synchronization, but I think it’s enough to make it work.”

  The ERI retracted, and finally Cray could get up. “Did I pass?”

  “Barely,” the technician retorted, turning back to Avalon. “I’m not guaranteeing the image won’t flake out. The whole thing could collapse while he’s in the imaging chamber.”

  “Just hold it together as long as you can,” she told him, then went over to Cray. He stood in front of the virtual display, looking at the model that was his mind. The numbers seemed infinitely complex, deftly interwoven, surely the design of a higher power—but quantifiable nonetheless.

  “You think that’s all there is to it?” he asked. “Just a bunch of figures, arranged in the right order?”

  Avalon was quiet. The pause was enough to grab Cray’s attention, and when he turned to her he thought he saw hesitation there.

  “Perception makes the reality,” she said. “Past that, it’s only chemicals and meat.”

  Cray flashed a wry smile, then shot a look at Evan, jerking his thumb toward the mind model. “You’re gonna erase that thing when we’re done, right?”

  The man snorted. “It ain’t going in my collection.”

  “What a relief. So what’s next?”

  Evan rolled his chair over to another control panel, wiping the dust off and flipping one of the switches. The panel lit up, and on the opposite end of the room Cray heard a hiss as yet another door opened. It led into a small vestibule, with room for only one person inside. The interior space was featureless, except for the photophores embedded in its walls. They glowed a multitude of colors as light bounced off, shifting as the viewing angle changed.

  The technician smiled, showing off a mouth full of polished teeth.

  “Step inside, cowboy,” he said.

  When the door closed, Cray was in darkness.

  The chamber filled with the sound of his breath, the smell of his sweat. He was accustomed to tight spaces, but the oppression of his body heat soon gave rise to the notion that the walls were closing in. Cray knew it was all psychological—maybe even a game run by his congenial host—but knowing that wouldn’t prevent the panic of sensory deprivation. Jerking his head back and forth, he searched the blackness for anything he could seize upon, his arms reaching out so that he could steady himself against the walls.

  But nothing was there.

  He felt just the opposite. The space expanded, the realization of it drowning Cray in a vertigo of empty space. The violent transition almost made him sick, and he found himself stumbling. He could have been running—Cray didn’t know, because he lacked the reference points to orient himself. He only knew that he wasn’t floating because of the tangible presence of ground beneath him.

  Then sound: a steady thrumming, off in the distance.

  Then light: barely a stab, a spearhead in the darkness.

  Reality assimilated.

  Cray expected a chorus of sensation exploding upon his plane of vision—but it was all just there, as if it had appeared under the most ordinary of circumstances. Light shimmered through water, his awareness fixating on a drape of bubbles—thousands of them—pushing their way upward in an endless stream, consciousness rising with them. Microcosm then shifted to macrocosm, a recession that dropped him into a larger world that materialized at the same pace he became aware of it, components pixelating into just the right proportions to create form out of the void. He found himself staring through the glass of a saltwater aquarium—tropical fish swimming through a tiny continuum of coral, a single sea fan waving in the gentle current. One of the fish stopped briefly to gaze at him, then realized its folly and moved on.

  The thrumming he had heard continued: a pump motor in a reassuring drone. Cray’s first notion was that he might be inside the aquarium, but the idea quickly passed as he felt himself sitting down in a couch of plush leather.

  Turning outward, Cray found himself in the waiting room of a small office. A coffee table snapped into focus in front of him, on which he saw a stack of old magazines. He stood, his eyes coming across several empty chairs, walls containing nondescript art, a few potted plants, and a lonely coatrack standing just inside a frosted-glass door.

  Then another sound—different, chaotic, frenzied.

  Tapping, coming from behind him.

  Cray spun around, and discovered that he was not alone in the room.
A young woman—a secretary—was banging away on a typewriter, her attention intently focused on the page in front of her. Slowly, uncertainly, Cray walked over to her desk.

  “Excuse me—”

  She hit the wrong key and stopped typing. “Shit,” the woman said, ripping the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. “Goddamn carbon copies. Always happens when I get to the end of a document.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She looked up at him. “You here to see the Assembly?”

  “That’s the idea,” Cray said, still trying to get his bearings. “Don’t know if I’m in the right place.”

  The secretary was unimpressed. “Here,” she said, pulling out a clipboard with a sign-in sheet attached. “Name, address, and phone number—and don’t put down anything phony. That really pisses off the boss.”

  Cray scribbled down the information and handed it back to her. She looked it over. “Out-of-towner, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Most of them are.” The secretary reached into her desk and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lighting up as she hit the intercom buzzer. “Dr. Alden is here.” She exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.

  “Wonderful,” came the reply. The voice was polite, with a strange accent. “Please send him in.”

  The secretary pointed to the wooden door behind her desk. “Help yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Cray told her, going over to the door and placing his hand on the knob. He glanced back before turning it. “Got any advice?”

  The secretary took another long drag, leaving a smear of bright red lipstick on the butt of her cigarette. Her eyes were worn and wise, in spite of her youthful appearance. But that was all it was—an appearance.

  “That’s what I thought,” Cray said, and went inside.

  It was a frosty hell. Enough to bite straight through his clothes and singe his skin, tapering off to establish a kind of equilibrium—a shift as radical as when he first arrived, but when he looked down he stood upon different ground.

  Gravel. Stone. No floor—only bare soil.

  Weathered soil, having seen the abuse of the elements and the ages—the telltale signs of a forsaken place. Cray was aware that he no longer had a doorknob in his hand. Instead, his arm extended to a canvas tent flap fluttering above his head.

  The welcoming ebb of a real fire brushed against his face, while a cold, harsh plume pushed against his back, ushering him into the tent. The howl of the wind outside told him it was a constant companion there—like a lonely, pained animal forever wanting to get in.

  Cray studied the interior. He was in a large tent—too big for a single person, with piles of mountain gear strewn about the place. He noticed several tables littered with tin cups and dirty plates, leaving him to wonder if he had somehow interrupted lunch. Taking a walk through, Cray poked at the backpacks with his foot and examined the remnants of the meal to find any signs of recent activity—but he found only dust. Nobody had touched anything for some time.

  But what about the fire?

  The warmth emanated from a pipe stove at the center of the tent. Cray went over and warmed his hands, the licking flames and rising heat an alien presence—as alien as he was.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “We’re here,” somebody answered. “You just have to know how to look.”

  The voice came from one of the corners of the tent—appeared was more like it, much like the man to whom the voice belonged. When he stepped forward, Cray was amazed at how he could have missed anyone of that size. The man wasn’t tall, but the breadth of his shoulders was easily twice Cray’s own. His arms looked as sturdy as steel ropes, folded in front of a barrel chest—the physique of a man who spent his life living at altitude.

  He was dressed in an amalgam of the primitive and modern—crude handmade beads hanging from his neck, with a coat engineered for the most extreme climates draped over his shoulders. Below that he wore blue jeans, the cuffs tucked into waterproof hiking boots. His features were Eurasian: the eyes faintly slanted, the skin a rich brown tinged with yellow. Based on all the mountain gear, Cray had him figured for a Sherpa—a reference that was purely historical. Those people had been extinct for over a hundred years, their culture swallowed up like so many others steamrolled by the civilized world.

  About the time the Assembly went into stasis.

  “Dr. Alden, I presume,” the Sherpa said.

  Cray studied him. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

  “Of course I do,” the Sherpa replied. “That’s how we designed it.”

  He offered Cray a seat at one of the tables, then sat down across from him. What followed was a long, complicated stare—the sophistication behind the Sherpa’s eyes a contradiction of his old world façade.

  “So,” Cray started. “What is this, anyway? My dream, or yours?”

  “It’s not nearly that complicated,” the Sherpa explained. “A series of common reference points generated to keep our minds glued to reality while we’re in stasis. All we did was let you in on the party.”

  “You picked a hell of a construct.”

  “It’s the easiest crossover we could find. If you had dropped in on one of our other horizons, the transitional shock would have killed you—or at the very least, made you insane. We’re not that used to company, I’m afraid.”

  “Sorry to intrude.”

  “What’s done is done.” The Sherpa leaned back, still regarding him with that pseudoclairvoyant expression—like he was already tunneling into Cray’s mind. “We’ve been under so long, it’s doubtful we could ever return to corporeal life. Lack of sensory input, you know. Same thing will happen to you, if you stay long enough.”

  “Is that what you have in mind for me?”

  The Sherpa laughed. “On the contrary, Dr. Alden,” he said. “None of this would have been necessary had you just allowed us to plug you in. All data, no images—that’s the way to do business. No messy subjectives to deal with.”

  Cray looked back at the enigma across the table. The Sherpa sat there for a while, allowing him to work it out for himself.

  “You’re the Assembly.”

  “You see?” the Sherpa said, with a genteel nod. “You’re starting to adapt already.” He got up and walked over to the stove, stirring the coals with a poker as he explained. “Everything here is a logical representation, Dr. Alden—including you. Even so, our physical conventions are flexible. By combining ourselves into a single entity, we can facilitate more efficient communication.”

  “Must play hell with the ego.”

  “It’s a kick, actually.” He picked a pot up off the stove. “How about some breakfast?”

  “Already ate.”

  “Just as well. The food here tastes like shit anyway.” The Sherpa went over to the entrance of the tent, opening up one of the stray backpacks and retrieving a leather pouch. He tucked the pouch under his arm, then motioned for Cray to follow. “Why don’t you come outside and help me? I’ll fill you in on the details, then you can tell me how you want to proceed.”

  “By that,” Cray asked, “do you mean I have a choice in the matter?”

  “You have a great many choices, Dr. Alden,” the Sherpa told him, not sounding at all threatening. “But you’ll find there is only one sensible choice for you to make—if you wish to continue breathing.”

  Sunshine came down like a hammer, filtered through the thin atmosphere of high altitude. The stark effect of the light was as chilling as the air that cut through it.

  Cray had to shield his eyes from the brightness, neural illusion or no. Under the shadow of his hand, he peeked out at the panorama that surrounded him and was astonished by its beauty, complexity—and magnificent desolation. A barren moonscape of ice and rock crunched beneath Cray’s feet as he walked. Towering over that were the mountains, silent sentinels that rose over nine thousand meters into the sky. The hurricane winds of the stratosphere blew snow off the peaks into gentle plumes and
anvil formations, brute force translating into ethereal art. The rendering of it all was sheer perfection, even if the technology that produced it was ancient.

  The Sherpa led Cray toward a craggy stone monolith. It was little more than a pile of rocks, adorned with a number of strange items. Colorful banners, flapping in the breeze, were draped all over it, and as Cray drew closer he could see photographs attached wherever there was room to hang them. There were dozens—some old, some new, keeping vigil over a small pile of abandoned climbing gear that rested at the base of the monolith. Cray thought at first that it was a memorial to those who had gone up the mountains, never to return. But then he noticed that all the photos depicted only seven men—different poses, different settings, even different times—but always the same faces, over and over again.

  The Assembly.

  A tombstone for those who were dead, but not dead.

  “I see the Punjab bodes well for us,” the Sherpa said, unwrapping the leather pouch he had brought with him. Out came a string of the colored banners, which flapped like kites, urged on by the wind. “Here,” he said, handing one end to Cray. “Help me hang these prayer flags. With the journey you’re about to take, you’ll need all the help you can get.”

  “Sounds like you have a job for me.”

  “Nothing that simple.” The Sherpa laughed. He walked the string around the monolith, securing his end between a couple of stones. “You see, we have this problem, one that requires a particular kind of expertise. There are some of us in the Assembly who believe that your unorthodox background would fit the bill perfectly.”

  “Some of you,” Cray wondered aloud.

  “The rest believe you should not be allowed to leave this facility alive.”

  Cray had already considered that possibility. Still, hearing it intrigued him.

  “At any rate,” the Sherpa went on, “cooler heads have prevailed—at least for now. I cannot, however, guarantee how long the situation can continue. We are all anxious to resolve this matter, Dr. Alden—and we demand results quickly. Mysterious enough for you?”