Zephyr III Read online

  “I’m Temper,” it replies. “Agent Temper.”

  “And him?”

  “Excelsior.”

  “Since when did they start letting AIs join the Feebs?”

  “AIs?” Temper looks at me a moment, expression suitably iron. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m not a droid. I’m a ferro-organic lifeform. My homeworld was destroyed in a –”

  “Look pal, I’ve got problems of my own right now,” I tell him.

  “No shit.”

  “Where’s Synergy? What are you fucking clowns doing here?”

  “You tellin’ me you didn’t notice Agent Vanguard downstairs in that dungeon?” the surfer boy says to me, waltzing over now he’s dusted the grass off his long-johns.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Where’s Synergy?”

  “Agent Synergy is dead,” Excelsior says bitterly. “Your friend here killed her.”

  “Synergy is . . . dead?”

  “That’s right,” the blonde tells me. “And, oh yeah. You’re under arrest.”

  I go to move, but there is a zap. My nerveless falling body gives me a slight glimpse of the hazard response team that has crept up behind me at the agent’s signal. In the face-plate of the guy holding the industrial immobilizer, I see myself reflected, expression something like a goldfish falling out of its bowl. I’m almost glad they’re using the suppressor type that causes blackouts. Oblivion is a bliss I don’t even have time to be thankful for as it comes rushing up out of the bowels of the earth to take me in its grubby hands.

  Zephyr 8.6 “A Momentary Dead End”

  THE ROOM IS white and clinical. The guy in the little glasses is too good looking to be a doctor, but that’s what his lapel pin tells me. The white coat and sheaf of manila folders are pure theatre and it is only a few seconds before I realize I am in the panopticon for such things.

  White Nine.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  The guy in the coat looks up and gives a fey little smile and resumes scratching notes into a pad with a black marker. His tiny black goatee and anime hair are too cute to be true. Likewise his flawless complexion, his cocksucker’s mouth, the Bambi eyes. Inside the matrix, they render the good guys more favorably and the bad guys get the low-res simulacra. Residual self-image. I should know, having been on the other side before. But now when I speak, my voice is thin and reedy, even though recognizably my own. I’m sitting on a plain hospital bed, 1950s chic, costume gone but my mask in place.

  There’s no way my legs are that fucking hairy.

  “I asked you what’s going on?” I whine.

  The doc holds a finger up to his lips.

  “Just a minute, please.”

  “We’re in White Nine. That right?”

  A blink of a smile plays across the other guy’s lips and he hesitates before putting down his pen.

  “That didn’t take you very long.”

  “I’m used to being here as a visitor. That should tell you something.”

  “What should that tell me?” the young doctor asks.

  “That I’m a good guy. This is bullshit. What’s happening here?”

  In the time between my question ends and the other guy replies, my thoughts are filled with charcoaled flesh and eyes blackened to awful pits.

  “I’m interested to know how you know you are, as you said, one of the good guys,” the doctor replies. “Why is that?”

  “I didn’t say ‘one of the good guys’,” I tell him. “You’re a shrink, right?”

  “I’m a clinical psychiatrist. How did you know?”

  “You answer every question with another question.”

  Again comes the pretty smile. It irritates me, but there’s no strength in my arms to do anything about it. In fact, I know for certain there’s no chance in hell I’d be able to move from sitting up on the side of the bed, should I get the idea to do something crazy. The suppressors are still keenly in place.

  “I’m Boromir Krgin,” the shrink says. No handshake.

  “Boromir?”

  “My folks were Tolkien fans. Hippies.”

  He shrugs and makes a pained face.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re under arrest. They’ve asked me to do an assessment.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “I’m sorry, Zephyr. I’m just a psychiatrist.”

  “So you know who I am,” I say and manage to fold my arms together once I convince them I have no ill intent.

  “Sure.”

  “So I am one of the good guys,” I say to him, daring he confirm it, but again there’s just that wry little introverted smirk and he moves some of the papers around on his desk.

  “I wanted to ask you a question,” Krgin says. “Bear with me on this one. I want you to imagine something for me and I’m going to ask for your reactions, OK?”

  “If I’m in White Nine then my real body is laying on a slab somewhere with a fiber-carbon enema, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Smirk = confirmation.

  “I want you to imagine you’re in the desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say and sway lightly on the bed.

  “You reach down and you flip the tortoise on its back –”

  “What? Why the hell would I do that?”

  “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help.”

  “So I fucking help it. Jesus. What’s the matter with you?” I ask him. “Do you write these questions yourself? I’m guessing you’re in a room somewhere beating off furiously right now. Am I right?”

  The doctor is about to say something else, shocked and flustered, when the white wall behind us cracks open in the shape of a door and somehow Synergy is standing there, radiant, serious, and even more beautiful than ever.

  Not bad for a dead chick.

  *

  “THANKS DOC. I’LL take it from here,” my tall Ethiopian goddess says and demurely waits by the door as Krgin frowns and collects his imaginary folders and nods to me and begins his exit.

  “How’d I do, doc? Did I pass?”

  “Well, there’s a battery of questions. . . .”

  I snicker and though I still can’t move much, I am relieved by the sight of the Federal agent pushing further into the room and the white panel door clicking invisibly back into place with the head-doctor gone. Synergy moves like a broken person as she slides into the vacant chair.

  “They told me you were dead,” I say softly. “Glad to see the rumors of your demise –”

  “They’re true.”

  I look Synergy in the face, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. Her expression is more like someone who has seen a ghost than become one.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your suspect killed me. This Seagal. Bushwhacked us when we stopped him for questioning. Never guessed he had any powers since he had a negative genetic profile. Gadgets though. Twenty-Third Century tech, if you can explain that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “But you knew about him.”

  Now with a flame of anger in her cheeks, the agent can look up, staring at me hotly.

  “I don’t know what I knew,” I say.

  An indeterminate length of time passes. I’m not sure if they switched me off for a minute there or what, but suddenly the room comes back into focus and Synergy has my attention again.

  “You were right about your mother. She’s not dead. Not that we know of, anyway.”

  “What?”

  The news hits me like a kick in the balls. It’s the last thing I expect to hear and it strikes me like a drunk’s explanation of an abstract mathematical concept.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her vibrations,” Synergy says. “I asked for a full spectrum breakdown after you came in and IDed the body. I guess you must
’ve convinced me.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We’re pretty sure it’s Catchfire, but not the one from this dimension. The vibrations are from another parallel. Each cell, you know, each atom of our body vibrates to the same frequency of the cosmos. . . .”

  “Like the whole multiverse is some immense lyre,” I say off-handedly, having heard this one before from – of all people – Black Honey, once, all the B-graders bombed on absinthe at the opening of some new Lindsay Lohan theme park in Jackson.

  “Yeah. So there’s a good chance your real mother is still out there.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  I have such an overwhelmingly unconscious need to wipe my face and ponder the imponderable that the room programming allows it and I am staring at my hand in front of my face before I realize what has happened and when the matrix catches up it flips out and then I am frozen again, hand in front of my face for three or four seconds before a technician somewhere cleans up the glitch and it drops into my lap like a dead fish.

  “So it’s not all bad news,” Synergy says softly.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Tempo managed to get an ID from his psychic . . . um, you know, that thing he does. We got the address yesterday – it’s still today, right? – and we landed a Chinook in the street and went up to the door. Seagal ambushed us, hit me with that fucking heat ray of his and had some other thing that killed the circuitry in Vanguard’s suit.”

  “You’re . . . dead?”

  “My body,” Synergy says.

  “Man, what a waste.”

  “They managed to download me here.”

  Synergy looks around the room, hands straight down on the edges of her seat and her black curly locks tumbling like an illustration around the white edges of her shoulders, suddenly younger and more fragile than she ever was in life.

  “I don’t even know what that means, Zephyr,” the agent says softly, not looking my way. “Am I still me or am I just a program designed to think that?”

  “Um. . . .”

  “How do you know you’re really self-aware?”

  “Would you like me to hold you?” I ask.

  The crass come-on does the trick and she breaks free from the syrupy grip of introspection.

  “No, Zephyr. I want you to tell me what’s really going on.”

  *

  I EXPLAIN AS well as I’m able the same outline so recently sketched for Hawkwind. About my father. My mother. The island. The Twelve. I even throw in my half-brother Julian and it really occurs to me I need to go back to Jersey and kick some faux French butt. As the Red Cowl, Julian’s been waging a war against his father’s legacy for years, it seems, though a war where it seems almost any of us could wind up a target.

  The Feebs tracked Seagal from computer files found in Tommy Hilfiger’s lair. I guess I should’ve seen it coming, though the silent recrimination and the tacit implication I am a factor in her murder smarts. After holding out on them, now my information seems stale compared to the latest developments, and it strikes me my own journey – tenure in a virtual jail cell notwithstanding – has reached a momentary dead end.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say with a tiredness I am apparently unable to feel. “My . . . girlfriend. My partner. She was also attacked by Arsenal.”

  “Lioness. She’s still alive. Barely.”

  I look around as if they might upload her to the imaginarium at any second, and Synergy gives an uncharacteristically coarse laugh.

  “Jumping at shadows, Zeph?”

  “Why am I here, Syn?”

  “Just for an assessment. It was a pretty crazy situation, they tell me,” Synergy explains. “You’re not facing any Federal charges. Just assault and battery.”

  “What?” I stare at her a second, but the agent is deep in her own private hell, picturing an eternity stuck in a virtual limbo, perhaps.

  “Who?” I ask eventually.

  “Negator,” she replies, blinking out of her reverie.

  “What? I haven’t seen Negator for years. And he’s a fucking loony.”

  “That’s not what the charge sheet says,” Synergy sighs. “He’s been clean for a few years now. Claim is you assaulted him on a film set?”

  I can only blink at this and shrug.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What,” Synergy asks. “You can’t remember?”

  “I can’t . . . No,” I say. “I can’t remember a damned thing about it.”

  She only smiles – or smirks, I should say. If I didn’t know better, a guy could get paranoid. The whole not-dead-but-virtually-dreaming looms like the mother of all cock-and-bull stories. There’s more than a hint of Krgin in her grin – or perhaps Krgin’s handler.

  “I prefer the Boromir from the cartoon, rather than the Ridley Scott adaptation,” I say to no one in particular.

  Zephyr 8.7 “Empathy Fatigue”

  I WAKE TO my own shitty existence, the smell of antiseptics, sweat and orange hydralite thick in the small hospital cell as I sit and clasp the furrow of my brow. A mirror opposite the bed shows the least of my injuries have already vanished, just a few light scratches across my cheek and chin flagging the other night’s encounter. A deep and expressionless sorrow remains. My eyes feel like they have been raped by leprechauns.

  I shouldn’t quip. The news my mother might somehow miraculously, inexplicably, hell, quite implausibly be alive in some corner of this goddamned universe has me quivering like a plucked string. But it’s a bum note. Regardless of the time it is, morning, cold and deleterious, hangs on me like a funeral shroud.

  As I am staring sightlessly, a monitor goes off somewhere and a nurse sticks his head in, backed up by two troopers in shock armor.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like shit.”

  “Pretty normal then?”

  A handsome grin.

  I nod. “I want to see Loren. Lioness.”

  The guy’s mirth vanishes like an exorcism and in minutes I’m rubbing my wrists where the hospital tags were, now wearing my black leather pants and boots and the sleeveless black tee, domino mask in place. No one comments on the missing logo and this seems like a cosmic indicator of my irrelevance rather than people being nice for a change. The air reeks of sympathy, but I’m under my own black cloud and I allow myself to be led down endless corridors to a palliative care ward, the tricked-out guards nowhere now to be seen.

  “I guess that means I’m no longer a threat,” I say to the nurse.

  He has a short-trimmed honey-blonde beard and eyes that have learnt to mimic warmth, the true depth of his experiences like a callus on the soul. He only purses his lips in a non-smile and the slab of heavy door stands between us. Again, it’s hard not to think he’s Krgin in disguise.

  “In here?”

  He nods and genuinely probably doesn’t think to say anything else until the words come out in their own sudden release.

  “Hey. Go easy on yourself in there.”

  I can only frown and nod and push into the door, feeling my full strength on its way back thanks to Arsenal’s massive booby-trap fail.

  The black thing on the bed is under surgical netting, an electronic device channeling up-to-date vital information to the rack of machines looming across the back like a line of alien priests waiting to administer the last rites. At first I cannot go too close. My repulsion is just one of many piled high emotions, nausea not the least of them. The body is unresponsive to my presence and I am relieved she doesn’t speak or turn or acknowledge me in any way, though it makes me wonder if I imagined her final words at Seagal’s hacienda.

  The door opens and closes behind me and I look and there is a late middle-aged doctor with a grey demeanor.

  “Is she going to live?” I ask.

  “There is an unnatural force sustaining her,” the doctor says with a faint Kiwi accent. I look at him and he gestures off-handedly.

  “It is hard to tell wi
th you parahumans,” he says. “We are dealing with so many factors outside ordinary physiognomy.”

  “She didn’t have any powers,” I say. “She . . . gave them up.”

  “Perhaps.” The doctor shrugs. “As I said, there is something keeping her alive. Brain activity is good. Her mind is alive, though we have suppressed her consciousness until we can do something for her physical condition.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  “It may be kinder to release her,” the doctor says. “Let her go.”

  I nod and stare at the bed. Over the minutes, my relief in her silence gives way to a gnawing, existential grief that can’t be expressed in such a confined and clinical space. As if suddenly furious at something, I stalk from the room and the door slams like a rifle-shot behind me.

  Excelsior and Tempo wait at the end of the hall.

  “There’s a problem,” the boy scout says and slides a thumb into the belt of his underpants.

  “That, junior,” I say, “is the understatement of the fucking century.”

  But of course he’s talking about something else entirely.

  *

  ON THE WIDESCREEN, chunks of what look more like gigantic hairy balls of shit than meteors thump down periodically across the city. Conveniently, a news crew is not too far from my apartment in Van Buren so I can be instantly updated on how the new neighborhood is rapidly turning into a third world country as the barn-sized organic globules unfurl into the most bizarre techno-organic motherfuckers I think I’ve ever seen. They vary in shape and size and physiognomy, though they seem to have the same basic purpose – to destroy as much stuff as possible as they assimilate civilians on the go. We watch, the other masks stunned, me just barely sociable as the sense of cosmic fucking inevitability hangs over the room and I see a guy in just a towel probably wondering why the hell he ever left his apartment as a big, green-brown, rolling, multi-armed, turd-like monstrosity overtakes him and he vanishes into the soft under-crust beneath the thing as it passes.

  “What the fuck are these?” I ask because somebody’s got to do it.