Bitstream

13.6

Titan lunges, slamming into the underposts. The grated platform quivers like a struck tuning fork, the vibration rattling through my teeth until my jaw aches. For a heartbeat I'm certain the catwalk will shear loose and drop us into the slaughterhouse below – but it holds, bolts shrieking in their sockets.

Fingers' grip clamps iron-hard on my shoulder, wrenching me sideways hard enough to nearly tear the joint. "Move!" she barks, and I don't argue. We sprint for the maintenance corridor.

I've no idea where it leads. No clue how we're supposed to circle back to the lobby elevator with that thing stalking the main floor. All I know is we have to hide, because bullets won't do a damn thing, and I can barely think, barely breathe.

The chimp vaults over the catwalk railing, squeezes into the corridor, and barrels towards us like a gorilla in a rage. Its fists hammer the metal, forearms driving it forward in explosive bursts that eat up the distance in seconds. I think about pulling up my quick-hack list, but it's moving too fast – if it reaches me, my skull will be pulp against the—

Fingers yanks me sideways again, dragging me through a jagged Z-shaped doorway. She slams a control panel, and the door seals shut with a hiss. Above it, a strip flares red: LOCKED.

The chimp shrieks, a piercing, animal howl, and pounds at the barrier. Each blow rattles dust from the ceiling and makes the fluorescents sputter. The frame shudders but holds – for now.

It takes me a moment to steady myself, to see through the blur of panic. When I do, I realise we're in another corridor, this one spilling into a chamber ahead. Tiered platforms step down into its core, where banks of consoles buzz with static text and command prompts. Hovering at the centre, a colossal holographic sphere burns in the air, fractured into bands of blue light and locked in claw-like anchors. Its surface scrolls with cascading encryption matrices, vertical curtains of symbols dissolving before they reach the floor. Cyan light washes the chamber, similar to the Earth hologram in the lobby, only rawer, more experimental. Not the sort of thing that would be on display to the public; that's for sure.

"That door won't hold it long," Fingers snaps, moving fast, down the steps, skirting the hologram at the centre. I trail after her, but the layout hits me quick: this place is a dead end. No corridors. No exits. Just walls. None that I can see, at least.

"Looks like we're boxed in," I manage, fighting for breath while the ape's hammering reverberates through the metal behind us. Each strike screeches like the frame's about to tear open.

"Yeah," she says after a beat, "and the only way back to the lobby is through the main lab."

"Then what are our options?" I press.

"Practically only one," she snaps. "You need to blind it long enough for us to get out of here."

Another crash reverberates through the door: slower this time, but still relentless.

"Here's the plan," Fingers continues. "You override the lock, let it through. Once it's clear of the choke point, you hit it with Black Iris. While it's blind, we bolt for the exit: main floor, straight to the elevator."

Security will see us, sure. But I don't care. Better that than being pulped under its fists. We can always brute-force our way past the guards. The only other option on paper is hiding and praying it loses the trail, but the last chimp nearly sniffed us out. That's not a gamble I'm willing to take.

I nod – whether for her or myself, I'm not sure. Opening that door feels like volunteering to shove my head into a furnace and hoping it only singes my eyebrows. But the alternative is waiting for the hinges to give and the chimp to rip us apart anyway. So I grit my teeth, summon the neural display, and there it is: Manual Override, then Black Iris. Quick. Clean. Efficient. Then we'll run. Out. Guards be damned; they won't see our faces through the suits anyway.

Breathe.

The battering shifts pitch: less blind fury now, more strategical if I have to guess. Whether that's instinct or some bastard code welded onto its brain, I can't tell, but it makes the thing feel meaner than muscle alone.

"Do it," Fingers urges, and her voice isn't steady either; she tries to make it sound clipped, tough, but there's a thread of raggedness there, a thread of fear.

I activate 'Manual Override' on the door panel and select 'Open'. The door's lock-light switches from red to green, and suddenly I feel like Judas, opening the gate not for a friend but for the thing that's going to kill me. The slabs grind open with a stubborn metallic whine, and for one heartbeat there's nothing – just silence, so thick I can hear my pulse in my eardrums – before the chimp comes barreling through, head down, shoulders hunched, eyes redder than the control strip it just broke past.

The whole corridor shakes when it hits the tiles, claws scrabbling for purchase, and my mind blanks so hard I almost forget the second part of the plan, the Black Iris. I almost forget that I have anything besides terror.

Then Fingers screams "Now!" and her voice slices through the brain fog, and I activate 'Black Iris'. My vision distorts, whites out, and I feel the heat roll off my skull as the programme lances forward.

The chimp stumbles, lets out a keening cry that's too close to human to be ignored, clutching at its head. It slams into the wall, arms flailing, and I know it's blind, the Black Iris doing its dirty work, but the problem is it's still alive, still strong enough to pulp us into jelly if it swings in the right direction.

"Go!" Fingers is already bolting, boots hammering the grated steps, and I tear after her, lungs blazing, legs threatening to buckle. The holographic sphere hisses static as we pass, the fractured blue light painting us as ghosts fleeing a séance gone wrong. We cut across the steps, but before we've cleared even half the chamber I hear something that doesn't belong: a shift in the creature's voice, not the wounded howl of a blinded thing but a wet, dragging inhale. It raises its snout – or what passes for one – and that's when I know.

It's smelling.

Not just air, but us. The stink of terror pouring off me. The sweat inside my suit, hot and horribly acrid. I don't know how, I don't know why, but whatever cocktail of machine and animal this thing is, it can taste us in the air, and the blindness doesn't matter a goddamn bit.

It swivels its massive head towards us, eyes clouded white with the hack, mouth working in a slack, trembling grin, and then it roars, a sound that makes the consoles rattle and my spine rattle worse.

We backtrack and it comes slamming for us with its gigantic, hulking fists.

CRASH!

It destroys ones of the centre consoles with a single pound, and the hologram zips out and shoots a long, electric string into the ape. It courses through the ape's body and causes it to screech uncontrollably, its tongue flaring out. The ape convulses in the sparklight, twitching and stumbling as though every wire in its flesh has caught fire at once, and for the first time there's an edge of hope in my chest, a cruel flicker that maybe we found its weakness, that maybe this nightmare has a seam we can finally tear open.

Electricity.

I bring up my neural display again and activate 'Short-circuit', striking it again, and it stumbles back towards the corridor, blocking the only way out.

"Hit it again!" Fingers says, and my instinct is to slam the command twice, three times, until Titan is nothing but cooked muscle, but my neural AI spits back:

"Request rejected. Please wait one hundred. And. Four. Seconds."

Shit! The fucking cooldown!

The chimp straightens, smoke pouring from its nostrils, eyes still blind but nostrils working like black holes, sucking every molecule of fear off me, and then it comes again, faster than it should be able to move, fists striking against the grated steps.

We scatter left, right, anywhere but under those fists, because one hit means the end, and I duck behind a console, metal ringing above me as its arm smashes through, spraying sparks into my face. The smell of burning circuits mixes with its sour, bestial reek, and I'm coughing, choking, my lungs begging for air but my body refusing to give the monster another whiff of weakness.

It's about to come down on me again when Fingers starts firing at its face directly, hitting it in the eyes. It lets out another squeal, and I scamper away to the other side of the chamber, only to realise that there is still another sixty seconds to go.

"Short-circuit," shouts Fingers in a frenzy.

"It's on cooldown," I shout back.

"God fucking damn it!"

The ape lunges for her, and like an acrobat she throws herself sideways, body twisting in midair, and I swear I hear her shoulder crack when she lands but she doesn't stop, just rolls, comes up with her gun spitting fire into its chest, the rounds ricocheting off the slabs of muscle and bone as though she were shooting at a bank vault instead of a living thing, and the sheer futility of it hits me harder than the thunder of its fists ever could.

I check the neural display again – fifty-two seconds now, a lifetime, a death sentence carved into glowing numbers – and I press myself against the tiered console bank, heart jackhammering so loud I'm convinced the monster is tracking it as easily as a sonar ping. Titan crashes towards me, slamming its fists into the floor, gouging holes in the grating, electricity fizzing up its forearms from the broken hologram anchor. For half a second I wonder if that's what it wants, if some twisted instinct in its hybrid brain has made it hungry for the shock, and then its head whips towards me and the speculation vanishes in the flood of pure, undiluted survival.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I bolt. I don't even think, boots slamming metal, and it follows, close enough that when it exhales I can feel the heat of its breath on the back of my neck, close enough that every step sounds like a coffin lid slamming shut. Fingers is screaming at me to draw it towards the projection core, to use the broken hologram's static fields as a makeshift lightning rod, but her voice is dim under the waterfall of adrenaline in my skull, dim against the sound of Titan's claws dragging ruts in the plating as it gathers itself for another great, big leap.

Thirty-one seconds.

I dive behind the central sphere again, praying the residual current is enough to spark, and when Titan collides with it the whole chamber lights up, blue fire dancing across the fractured bands, wrapping around the beast's torso in jagged veins of light. It convulses, lets out a scream that is half gorilla bellow and half human agony, and for a moment I believe that's it, that it's going to cook right here in front of me. But the hologram shorts out completely this time, the projection collapsing into dead static, and suddenly it's free again, smoke rising off its skin.

Nineteen seconds.

"Now!" Fingers yells, voice raw, and I shout back that it's not ready, it's still ticking down, and she swears so loud it cuts through the monster's howl, then empties the rest of her magazine into its jaw just to get its attention away from me.

Nine seconds.

I run again, zigzagging through consoles, sparks showering down where Titan's fists carve through the hardware, and I know one mistake, one slip, and I'll be paste against the wall. My lungs are burning holes in my chest, my muscles screaming for oxygen, but I keep moving because moving is the only thing keeping me alive.

And it catches me, strikes my leg with so much force I feel the pain climb up the side of my body and prance all across my muscles in a deep spread of volatile infection. I go flying across the room and onto a metal stoop. The ape is slower now, no doubt affected by the electricity, heaving and squealing with those monstrous, bloody optics and that tongue that extends down from its maw in snakish slithers.

And it walks over to me, and the adrenaline coursing through my body isn't enough to ward off the pain. All I can do is scream, cry, and accept, without any doubt in my being, that this had all been for nothing.

Three seconds. That's all the readout gives me, but three seconds feels like three decades, the little numbers mocking me in grey font, the way a clock mocks a condemned man as the hands crawl towards midnight. The ape looms, its shadow blotting out the fluorescents, its breath a hot chemical fog spilling across my face.

"Move!" Fingers is screaming again, her boots hammering on the upper platforms, firing her pistol to draw its attention, and I want to tell her it's useless, that bullets are gnats on a hide like that. This time it's not fooled. It doesn't look away. It brings up its colossal arms, ready to smash down on my body and tear me limb from limb.

One.

I activate short-circuit and right as Titan is about to slam down, it shakes off course; the effect doesn't so much stop it in place as much as it does shift it off to the side. The result is one shocked, furry, muscular limb crashing towards my arm, but I instinctively snap my mantisblade up and—

Shtkkkkk.

The blade finds the gap in its armour and pierces through its flesh; the electricity courses through it and pumps into me; my cyberware absorbs it and spits it back out through my emergency protocols, a feedback loop.

It reminds me briefly of the time I destroyed that android in The Ghost in Satin, but rather than falling limp, the chimp flails back, carrying me along with it, and hurls me helplessly across the floor. My head strikes the centre of the room where the holo orb had been, and Fingers rushes over to me, helping me up.

She gets her arm under my shoulder, practically dragging me as my bad leg buckles beneath me, and the pain is so bad I almost puke right there on the floor, but somehow I manage to hobble, half-hop, half-limp, because the only thing worse than the pain is the thought of what happens if I stay still and let it gain on us, that heavy scrape of its knuckles against the floor ringing out behind us like the footsteps of some enormous executioner who has all the time in the world.

Titan staggers forward too, slow now, shambling, every motion accompanied by the wet crackle of its overheated muscles, but the slowness doesn't comfort me; it makes it worse somehow, because it's no longer a frenzied predator; it's something else, something patient, a thing that knows we can't outrun it forever and is content to stalk us through this white-lit tomb until one of us collapses.

The exit of the chamber looms ahead, a rectangular promise of escape glowing dull green on its control strip, and we limp for it, faster than I ever thought I could move while half-crippled, and I can feel every second like a drumbeat in my teeth, the chimp's breath dragging closer, hot-hot-hot, filling up the back of my head as though it's already there, already lowering its mouth to crack open my skull.

We stumble through the threshold – Fingers shoving me in, practically throwing me across the narrow corridor – and I twist around. Titan's bulk lumbers down the corridor after us, shoulders scraping the frame, teeth gnashing, arms outstretched to grab, and for a single terrible second its whole body is framed there in the opening, too big to belong to the space it's filling.

That's when I get the idea.

"Come on!" Fingers pulls on me, and I step away, but only barely, because when Titan the Gigantic Chimp manages to squeeze itself into the frame of the doorway and is seconds away from making it past the threshold, I activate 'Manual Override' on the door, and the slabs slide together, clamping Titan with several tonnes of mechanical force.

It lets out yet another horrifying squeal, and I watch as it reaches its arm towards the corridor wall at the T-junction.

An AI voice plays out from the hallway speakers:

"Anomaly detected. Please stand clear."

The doors clamp even tighter, and Titan wheezes out subtle 'ooh, ooh, oohs' as its breath hitches. Slower now, as we make our way towards the main lab, softer, softer… gone.

When we make it back to the central lab with all the bodies nightmarishly stacked upon one another, I let out another cry of agony and Fingers sets me down against the wall.

"Sit up," she snaps.

"It hurts – fuck, it hurts so bad!" I gasp, trying to control my breathing.

"Just hold still a damn second." She presses her thumb against my mouth, peeling back the anti-fibre, then digs into the side pocket of her suit. Out comes an MX-inhaler. No hesitation – she jams it against my lips, thumbs the injector, and a sharp puff of lemony vapour floods my throat, liquid warmth spilling down into my lungs in a shot of fire disguised as citrus.

But I'm still panting with terror, still unable to control my breath, still, still—

"Mono!" she shouts.

"I'm gonna fucking die! This is it – I'm – I'm—"

"Stop it," Fingers snaps. "You're acting crazy."

I place my hand on my chest in some desperate attempt to stop my heart from pounding. "I – it's going to kill me—"

She unzips my head covering. "Rhea. Breathe."

"I can't—"

She unzips her own head covering, revealing her sweaty face and cyan hair. She grabs me by my cheeks and forces my head still, eyes boring into me. "You're not dying here," she says. "Not while I've got you. So take the air, Rhea. One breath. Then another. That's it."

"I can't—"

"You can. Just breathe for me. Come on, Rhea."

"You.... Fingers...."

Her hands are iron on my face; she holds me with an inexplicable kind of anchor that keeps me grounded in the moment, in reality… not in fear. And those eyes, so pink, so gentle, are somewhat calming. I drag in a breath, the lemon-bite of the inhaler still clinging to my tongue. The pain killers are beginning to take effect, and I'm feeling less… chaotic. Then I drag in another breath, slower this time, and then another.

Fingers leans in closer. "Alright?" she says softly.

"Yeh... yeah," I manage.

"Take your time," she says. "I got you, and I'm not going nowhere."

Her voice is so soft. No bark or bite anymore. I know she's been acting differently lately after reconnecting with her sister, but this is… what is this… and why am I having these thoughts? This doesn't make sense.

I know it doesn't.

But the thoughts happen anyway.

And my hand reaches up to her face.

"What are you—?" she starts.

This is crazy. This is the worst time, the worst place—

I pull her towards me.

And we kiss.

Not soft, not tender, not like in the stories where the world slows down and violins play. It's desperate, bruising, a collision more than anything else; we've run out of words. I've run out of words. Her lips taste of metal and sweat, and mine probably taste of blood, but neither of us pulls away, not right away, because the heat of it is the only thing real in a room full of stacked corpses and burned circuits and the memory of Titan's scream still echoing through our skulls.

The kiss lasts a while. I'm not sure how long. But it doesn't matter.

None of this even feels real.

When it does break, she just stares at me, as if she can't believe it's real either.

"Jesus…" she starts. "What the hell was that?"

I can't answer right away, throat thick, heart still hammering. "I… I don't know," I admit, and it comes out broken, half a laugh, half a sob. "I thought I was gonna die, and then – you were there, and I just—"

She leans back a little, running a hand through her damp cyan hair, eyes darting anywhere but me. "This is crazy—" She cuts herself off, bites her lip, then shakes her head hard like she's trying to dislodge the thought. "I just. Fuck."

"I'm sorry."

"No," she says. "Duh-don't worry about it. Do you feel better?"

"Yeah," I say, trying to shift the topic, carefully measuring my words. "Though I don't think I'm in any position to run. It's risky, and our suits are – well, they're not gonna hide us."

She looks back over the railing, down at the large cargo elevator where the chimps and employees brought up the month's hall. "I-I have an idea," she says.

"What kind of idea?" I manage, though my leg is still weak and my heart hasn't stopped doing somersaults since the kiss.

"The kind that gets us out of here without being cuffed," she says, leaning heavier against the rail. She taps her boot against the grating, thoughtful, eyes fixed on the elevator's shadowed cage. "But it won't be clean, Mono. It won't be easy. You're gonna have to get your hands – or well, hand – dirty and gun some chimps into the ground."

For a moment it's quiet, save for the hum of the fluorescents and the rattle of my breath, still shaky but steadier than before, steadier because she made me kiss life back into myself whether she meant to or not. I look at her, at the cyan hair clinging damp to her forehead, the jaw that looks carved out of stubbornness, the eyes that burned me back into the world, and I realise something I don't want to say out loud, not here, not now.

We're not out of this yet.

"Alright," I say. "What's the plan?"