Hammerjack Read online

  The corpse did not hear, and did not see. Its eyes stared past him—stared through him—as the rest of its body spasmed from random electrical impulses.

  Zoe’s left hand, which took on a life and purpose of its own, reached for his throat.

  Cray heard a scream. Whether it was him or someone else, he didn’t know. He only knew the sensation of dead flesh slapping against the side of his neck, then cold metal as the transdermal contact on Zoe’s wrist came into contact with his skin. Cray felt something like the sting of a wasp penetrating him.

  Then the pain was gone, and the fingers fell away. Zoe slumped back against the wall.

  Cray scrambled, stumbling through the wreckage of the elevator until his balance went and he crashed into the floor again. He felt the touch of human hands, but only had a vague notion of being dragged out. He didn’t fight it until some time had passed and a cold stab of neural light beat those primal impulses back into his subconscious.

  Cray pried himself loose from the people who held him.

  “Mon chief,” someone said. The accent was thick—foreign to this part of the world, even with its multiple dialects. “Tell me you okay?”

  Cray assimilated his focus. He turned in the direction of the voice and found two pairs of dark eyes, an odd but appropriate mixture of craziness and understanding. The two men were West Islanders, long dreadlocks hanging over baggy coveralls.

  “You okay, mon?”

  Cray noticed their stim scars—lighter patches of skin on their foreheads, partially hidden by their locks. Caribbean dealers, he thought. Voodoo and hard technology, a real synthesis of the old and the new.

  “Yeah,” Cray told them. “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Don’t want no thanks, mon,” the islander said. “Just doing you a turn. Strong magic deserves respect.”

  A touch revealed a tiny cut on his neck where Zoe had grabbed him. It also revealed how shaky his perceptions were. He reacted defensively.

  “Don’t know what that was,” he said, “but it wasn’t magic.”

  “It magic whether you wants it to be or not,” the islander insisted. “Dead magic the strongest of all.”

  Four hundred floors up, Cray peered out a window that spread the massive cityplex of Kuala Lumpur at his feet.

  The building that housed GenTec’s corporate headquarters stood at the exact center of the island nation, affording Cray a spectacular view of the metropolitan night. Spires rose from the tops of the towers that surrounded him—Muslim architecture that persisted even after centuries of progress had homogenized the other urban sprawls that spread across the face of the planet. Cray found it easy to lose himself in the galaxy of light outside the glass, in spite of the reasons that had brought him here. It was a reminder—if only an illusion—that not everything was happenstance.

  “Hey, Alden,” he heard Dex saying behind him. “You just come here to hang out, or are you actually gonna look at this thing?”

  Dex Marlowe had been on the job as long as Cray—not as a spook, but as a genetic medical examiner, another one of the darker arts that the Collective liked to cultivate. The difference was that Dex, unlike Cray, didn’t suffer from regret. That was baggage reserved for those who worked the streets.

  Pale blue light cascaded across Cray’s face as he turned away from the window. It shimmered along the walls and the floor, shadows of viscous light giving the room a sense of coherent motion. Dex was working his voodoo on the other side of the room.

  “Did you dig it out?” Cray asked.

  The GME swiveled around in his chair, fixing Cray with a knowing smile. Behind him was a complex array of control consoles linked to a large virtual display. Columns of numerics poured through thin air like a waterfall—a representation of the exobytes of data being dumped into GenTec’s domain.

  “You’d be a lot happier if you didn’t think so much,” Dex said. He was young—even younger than Cray, with a shock of thick red hair piled high enough to make him look like street species. “Look at me, man. No more frontal lobe activity than is necessary to accomplish the task.”

  “The voice of experience,” Cray shot back.

  “I know what works, my man. If anybody’s up for a trip, it’s you. Do me a favor and let me hook you up. I ain’t even talking industrial-grade. There’s some stuff I developed myself—won’t alter your reality so much as bend it.”

  It was an old joke between them. Dex knew Cray’s reputation, and was always trying to break him off the narrow. “Thanks but no thanks,” Cray told him. “I got a slippery enough grip as it is.”

  “Suit yourself. So you wanna check it out?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, my man,” Dex said, shaking his head. “But it’s pretty weird, whatever it is.”

  Cray walked over to the extraction tank at the center of the room. It was about the size and shape of a coffin, with transparent walls that refracted cold blue light—the energy that pulsed within. Inside, Zoe floated in a protease-accelerating solution—thousands of fiber links sprouting from her body—drawing information from her tissues as easily as blood might be drawn through needles.

  “Weird is a relative term.”

  “Not in this business,” Dex observed, staring at the face inside the tank. Bathed in a hallucinogenic glow, Zoe looked angelic. “I can see why she got under your skin. Makes you wonder how she got to be a runner.”

  “Same reason you and I do what we do,” Cray said. “For the money.”

  He joined Dex at the control console, his eyes narrowing as he studied the virtual display. The GME had slowed the draw considerably, but still the node had trouble keeping up with the data flow.

  “You noticed,” Dex said, reading the expression on Cray’s face.

  “This isn’t a bottleneck?”

  “No way. I run a single node switch from here with no inbound traffic from the Axis. I’m the only one taking up bandwidth.”

  “It’s barely keeping up.”

  “I know. When I first started, the extract came on so fast I had a dozen buffer overruns before I even knew what was happening. Girlfriend was carrying some shit, man. Where did Phao Yin say this came from?”

  “Tagura West.”

  “The crawler attack?” Dex laughed. “Alden, what we got here makes those Tagura CMs look like old news—unless those boys got some skunk works I haven’t heard of.”

  Cray raised an eyebrow. “What are the chances of that?”

  “Come on, Alden. You know I ain’t supposed to talk about my other clients. I’ll get a bad reputation.”

  “You already got a bad reputation.”

  Dex smiled. “I know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” His hands glided across the control console, punching up another display sheet. The numerics that had been hovering in front of them disappeared, and an electron scan materialized in their place. It showed a single bare strand of DNA, magnified fifty thousand times. Dex zoomed in on it some more, revealing the complex series of proteins that formed a sheath around the strand.

  “Look familiar?” he asked.

  Cray recognized the pattern. It was artificial—genetically engineered, perfect in every way. “Looks like standard flash.”

  “On the surface,” Dex countered. “Inside is a different story. For one, this baby can encode a hell of a lot more information than anything I’ve ever seen before. My guess is that whoever designed it overcame the inherent problems we’ve had with leaky sequencing. They’ve pushed the bonds to almost full capacity.”

  “That’s about fifty times better than the high end,” Cray said, frowning. “You sure you got this right?”

  “The floodgates are open, my man. You saw how my network had trouble swallowing this stuff.”

  “So this is something new.”

  “Yeah—but that’s not the interesting part.” Dex zoomed back out again, freezing the playback while he spoke. “Flash is designed to act as an inert virus. It adapts the characteristics of the
host, so it doesn’t trigger an immune response. Under those conditions, it can reside in the bloodstream indefinitely—which is why it’s the medium of choice for information smugglers.”

  Dex leaned back in his chair and pointed at the virtual display.

  “Watch,” he said, restarting the playback.

  The strand of DNA was still. After a few moments, Cray noticed a slight quivering at the edge of the frame. A single, nucleated cell was cruising into the picture.

  “I use a variety of eukaryote constructs for cultivation media,” Dex explained. “I got curious to see what would happen if our friend here caught a whiff of one.”

  The strand immediately sensed the cell’s presence and moved toward it. Hovering around the cell, it found a spot on the exterior membrane and attached itself—drilling a hole through the protective layer and inserting itself into the body of the cell.

  “Damn . . .” Cray began, unable to get his voice above a whisper, unable to believe what he was seeing.

  “I knew you’d be impressed.”

  “This is real time? This isn’t accelerated?”

  “Twenty-seven seconds from start to finish. This guy doesn’t like to mess around, even for a genetically engineered virus. But here’s the weird part.” Dex flashed forward, punching up a still scan of the cell several hours after the flash had invaded. “A virus uses the genetic mechanisms from a host cell to replicate itself—destroying the host in the process. But our guy has other plans.”

  The cell didn’t look any different. Dex clicked forward through a dozen more scans, advancing one hour at a time—but no deteriorating effects were visible in any of them.

  “What happened?” Cray asked.

  “Nothing,” Dex answered, “or so it would seem. I haven’t had a chance to run pathology on the cell construct yet.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Dex crossed his arms in front of his chest. “A reverse virus,” the GME decided after a few moments. “Instead of replicating itself, it mutates the genetic code of the host cell. Then it spreads like an aggressive form of cancer—but like flash, it doesn’t provoke any kind of immune response.”

  “Zoe didn’t show any of the signs?”

  “Blood series came back clean.”

  “So her body accepted it.”

  “Like it was the most natural thing in the world,” Dex said. “Nothing has ever been designed to do this.”

  So this is what Zoe was carrying around, Cray pondered, and at least one thing became very clear: Phao Yin knew about this stuff—that’s why he wanted it so bad.

  “What about the numerics?” he asked. “You figured those out yet?”

  “There’s an encryption algorithm I haven’t seen before,” Dex told him. “I got software that should be able to crack it in a few days—but I’m pretty sure you ain’t gonna find any trade secrets buried in there, Alden. All that flash capacity was probably eaten up by the replication parameters. It’s pretty beefy stuff.”

  Cray got up and went back over to the tank, searching Zoe for answers. Never before had he found himself so in envy of a corpse.

  “So it exists,” Cray muttered. “And its only function is to keep on existing?”

  Dex shrugged. “It’s flaky—but are we any different?” He hopped out of his chair, strolling over to the wet bar on the other side of the room. It was well stocked with ancient liqueurs—just one of the GME’s many expensive vices. He poured himself a glass of cognac, holding the liquid up to the azure glow and swirling it into a tiny maelstrom. “So what are you going to do with this?”

  “You believe in crusades, Dex?”

  “Not since I started working for a living,” Dex replied. “You planning some anarchy? We could use the entertainment around here.”

  “I’ll work on it. How soon can you run the pathology?”

  “The constructs need a little bit of time to cook. Should be ready about the same time as the numerics.”

  “Good,” Cray said, heading for the door. “If anybody asks you what you’re doing, make something up. I don’t want any of this circulating until I know what’s going on.”

  “Suits me fine. I get paid by the hour. So where are you going?”

  “To stir up some trouble.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Dex said, as Cray disappeared.

  Yin’s sanctuary was at the apex of the tower, another 250 floors up. Cray had visited the place on only one occasion, and that had been ten years ago—back when he was impressed by such things, and the illusion that he was a free man gave him a sense of hope. It was then he had met the man who would become his boss, and the expectations the Collective had for him became clear.

  Cray could still hear the words Yin spoke echo off the walls: It all sounds so harsh, doesn’t it? I know that in this moment, and from this moment on, you will hate me for it. But I have already made you a rich man by bringing you here—and you will become richer still as you serve me. That is my promise and your price.

  Every word of it had been true. Cray’s endeavors for Phao Yin had earned him a fortune—and therein lay the irony. The art was in how Yin had used the money as a way to twist the knife in Cray’s back. He had all of the spoils, but none of the victories. His conscience wouldn’t allow it.

  There was no one to greet him as he stepped off the elevator. Only the automated sentry acknowledged his presence, and allowed him to proceed to the twin oak doors that guarded the entrance to the sanctuary. The doors parted by themselves, revealing an ornate foyer that was even more magnificent than Cray remembered. Twin marble pillars rose up to touch a domed ceiling, the styles and architecture uniquely Muslim. A collector of antiquities, Yin had put on display some of his most formidable pieces—a sculpture by Leonardo, a bust by Rodin, works of art that demanded an exorbitant price in both blood and money. Not that he was such an admirer of beauty, but the rarity of the relics conveyed the opulence that was Yin’s living and working space—as well as the power of the man who occupied it.

  As if anyone could forget, Cray mourned. GenTec was one of the Collective’s seven charter companies, and although Yin was not officially on the board, his was the kind of influence that made gangsters tremble. Cray worked in shadows—but even that couldn’t compare with the darker regions of Yin’s existence.

  Cray heard footsteps across the foyer—not hard clicks against marble, but bare feet. He looked into the garden atrium beyond and saw someone coming toward him. It was a kid, no more than fifteen years old; but as the kid drew closer, Cray could see how that youth was belied by a detached vacuousness. It was an expression Cray recognized from the street.

  The kid was a hustler. A pale torso was exposed beneath an open silk shirt, probably something Yin had given him to wear. Cray noticed the uneven ripple of his muscle tone, evidence of a botched myostim implant some butcher had given him in an illegal clinic. Pimps provided the service for their younger hustlers to accelerate their bodies past puberty and put them on a paying basis. Kinks liked their meat that way. From the looks of this one, he had been in the profession for some time.

  “You here to see the man?” the hustler asked. His head was lilting to the side, a neuropatch visible beneath a shock of dirty blond hair. He looked right through Cray.

  “Yes.”

  The hustler smiled, amused by something only he could see. “Follow me.”

  He made a lazy turn and shuffled across the atrium, not caring whether Cray was behind him or not. The hustler was only half-there in any case. Neural and chemical stims had long since robbed him of any capacity to feel emotions, let alone pain—the evidence tracking across his back in a patchwork of scars Cray saw through transparent silk. Kinks also liked their meat tenderized.

  Flying on autopilot, the young hustler led his charge through a maze of rooms that ended at Yin’s office. Unlike the rest of the sanctuary, this space was actually elegant in its simplicity—but it was no less an exhibit. Artificial gaslight kept the atmosphere dim, like something out of
a previous century, the rows of ancient books that lined the walls lending a faint undertone of must to the otherwise sterile air. The only intrusion from the modern world came through a large window that opened upon a panoramic view of Kuala Lumpur’s transport grid—pulser vehicles suspended on intricate tendrils of laser light, a complex dance of perpetual motion.

  The hustler flopped down on a calfskin couch, closing his eyes and zoning out.

  Cray stayed on his feet, walking over to a huge marble desk that sat in front of the window. He ran a hand along its smooth, cold surface. The piece had been fashioned from a single slab of rock, its origins probably as ancient as everything else in the room.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  Yin made his appearance as he always did—out of the dark, with no warning. Cray was used to the theatrics, and paid it no mind.

  “That depends on what you’re talking about.”

  It had been at least two years since he had last seen Yin, but the man looked exactly the same. Laotian by birth, he lacked the striking features of the Japanese—his face round and soft, solid black hair flanked by gray at the temples. With his demeanor, he could have been mistaken for a businessman if not for his eyes, which radiated an unmistakable intensity.

  “The same old Cray,” Yin observed as he stepped into the light. “Still no appreciation for the finer things.”

  “I know the score,” Cray replied. “That’s enough for me.”

  Yin strolled over to his young charge, who remained prone on the couch. “Then it’s the score you’ve come to settle,” he remarked, running a hand through the kid’s hair. “It’s a pity your needs aren’t simpler. Your life would be so much the better for it.”

  “You want to have this conversation in front of Sleeping Beauty?”

  “I prefer not to have this conversation at all. This isn’t part of our arrangement, Cray.”