Bitstream

Part 3

My Wager of Love

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

— Invictus, William Ernest Henley

8.1

Isolde Crane watched as the body of Cormac O'Cormac curled into a burnt-out husk, and in the flames with no arms or features left, he looked like what the universe had always deemed him to be: a snake, dying late. She hadn't expected to find him here. It was supposed to be a clean infiltration through the wasteland where she would fry any and all opposition that stood in her path to Cierus, to Ourovane. But now that she had, she felt that for once the world was finally sliding her the aces, even if a bit too late.

She stepped back from the blazing snake body and looked over at his crewmates, perhaps his platoon, on the other side beneath the Clawfather's shadow. They must have been hunting her, too. Must have finally been trying to put an end to Cierus Marlow's reign. She didn't know. Didn't care. What was important was that they wouldn't stand in her way; no one would.

The man with the brown hair and the ratface was picking up the blue-haired lady, offering her a hit of MX, but she was too unconscious to even respond. He was still shaking quite badly from when Isolde had electrocuted him. He looked at the blue-haired lady with this strange sense of worry that she couldn't quite pinpoint; he was a soldier, she thought. He wouldn't care that their sergeant was taken down, would only go back to the base and find a new one, and whoever that was on the floor, Morgan Ellis-Vale to her spoofer, would forget about it the next week, maybe even next hour. So, what was the problem? This entire country accepted death for what it was. There was no need to care, not anymore.

"You didn't have to do that," the man yelled, and Isolde immediately detected a hint of Australian. "You—you're some fuckin' monster!"

Isolde glared at him, drawing up his name as Dance Fletcher. When she spoke next, her voice was lower. "Tell that to the corpse that murdered my child." She clenched her fist. "You want to end up in that fire with him? Keep talking."

Dance continued to stare at her with his mouth drawn open into a rictus, his shoulders slumped as he got down on one knee and tried to force-feed the inhaler serum into Morgan's unconscious body. He was a man who accepted defeat when he knew there was no alternative; Isolde could tell that right away. "Come on," he told Morgan. "Stay with us, mate. You're alright."

Isolde felt the OS systems in her pocket (she had what she'd come for), but as she moved away from the flames and made her way towards the climbing platforms in the distance, one final voice stopped her in place, and she recognised it. She'd always recognised it, from the very start, as that of Rhea Steele.

"What he did to you wasn't right," she managed to say, picking herself up like some cockroach that refused to just roll over and die. "He morally fucked up—I admit it."

"You admit it?" Isolde rasped.

"Let me finish," Rhea said.

"You stuck around with him, worked for him, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with those events on the north side," Isolde said. "A monster who listens to no one and just kills, takes, does what he wants. Someone like you would sure as fuck work for someone like him, wouldn't you? So maybe I should kill you, too. Is that where you want this to go?"

Rhea coughed, spat blood into the dirt, then looked up at Isolde with something close to defiance. It was burned around the edges but most definitely still intact, and Isolde had no idea how. "I don't want to go that direction. But if you think I'm going to beg, you've picked the wrong woman."

Isolde stepped forward.

"And yeah," Rhea continued, "I worked with him. Because survival doesn't always come with clean choices. You think I wanted to? You think I didn't clock what kind of man he was the second he opened his mouth?" She pointed a trembling finger at the smoking corpse. "He was off. Broken. And he knew it. You think I didn't see that? He hated what he'd done, even if he never said it out loud."

"Does it look like I give a flying fuck?" Isolde said. "Now I really suggest you keep quiet, and this is your last chance because my patience is wearing soooooo thin with you. I should just kill you and be done with it, but see, that's what separates us: I don't kill people just for my own personal gain. I kill because there's a function: it's a step in destroying a system that does nothing but cause misery for those turning the cogs."

Rhea held up her hand – it was shaking something awful, and perhaps not with fear, but unsteady nerves. "Look, I'm not your enemy. I never was to begin with. I don't blame you for the way you're… responding to things. And I know what I've done. Trust me, I'm not perfect either. But who the fuck is? This path you're going down, whatever you want with those Ourovane people…. Look, I'm sorry, alright? If you want to hurt me… then do it, but I stand by my point that what you did here… the way you're acting out… it's not good. We all cared about him. He was a friend."

"Choose your friends more wisely next time," Isolde said. "Because I'll tell you this: had he just listened for one second to the words that came out of my mouth that night, my life would be much different, and this, everything around you, this burning shit, this world that does nothing but make people feel worthless, would not exist. Because I'd fix it, just as I'm planning to fix it now."

"By killing people?"

"No," Isolde said. "By making sure the ones who keep the machine turning finally know what it feels like to get caught in the gears."

"Well, I hope you find solace in that," Rhea said, limping forward and helping Morgan, who was finally starting to show signs of life, up to her feet. "But don't stand there and tell yourself that what you're doing is for the greater good. It's not. You need to point your anger at the right people. I've come to learn that. You might do well to do the same."

"Don't make me laugh." Isolde tightened her fist again. "I saw a little of your past, Rhea. I saw what you're like deep down even if you don't remember. And I know that's what you're after. I'm no fool."

"What?" Rhea said, her eyes flashing wide through that dead visor. "My past?"

"That's right," she said in a lower voice. "I combed through Cierus' memories while you were bleeding out on the ground. So, I'll give you a little secret to get you started: Ourovane isn't a group, and you won't believe where it came from, Little Spark. Heh. You won't believe who built it."

Rhea didn't look like she could believe it. Dance handed her an MX inhaler. She took a hit, but she was clearly too damaged to reap much of the benefits. There was still that limp she had to account for. She stared at her. "… It?" she said, and then fell silent for a time before adding, "Just leave, Isolde. You've made your point. Really fucking made it."

"Oh? That piss you off?"

"Yeah," Rhea said, wrapping her only arm – the left one – around Fingers' body, helping her keep balance as they all looked at Isolde. "It does, but that's alright. I have bigger things to worry about. I'm tired, and I'm in pain, and we're all bleeding to nothing so if you're going to kill us then just do it. Otherwise, respectfully, get out of my face."

"Don't act like you're the one with the moral high-ground here," said Isolde. "You're just as bad as me. All of you are. How many people have you killed on the way here? How many have you killed just to make some money? Hell, look at everything around you. You had something against Cierus, but killed many of her employees for, what, your memory? I saw what happened. You could have said no, could have walked out and maybe Cormac would be alive. So realistically, Cormac is dead because of you and you alone."

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"Fuck you!" Rhea shrieked, her face tight with rage, and then lunged forward, but Dance and Vander held her back. Struggled, but managed. "FUCK YOU!" she roared.

Oh, now that touched a nerve.

Isolde glared at Rhea intensely. She had balls; that was for sure. "Yeah, well fuck you, too." And she walked away, letting her seethe in the consequences of her actions. She was certain that Rhea knew there was a great deal of truth to her statement. She just wasn't strong enough to handle it.

They never are.

Isolde Crane walked the entire distance of the junkyard's first half and made it to the climbing stairways that looked partially held together by repurposed industrial detritus and, to some extent, hope. She felt alien, as if someone had injected her body with silicone in a dozen places and it was now sprouting up to the size of a blimp, but she knew that was only the heat of her anger, and rather than blowing up it was channelling down, like an old steam valve in a dying factory, shrieking and rattling with every turn, pressure hissing through the cracks not to release, but to feed something deeper, something colder. A machine, to the bold and the unwise, but not the kind that malfunctioned; this machine would continue on its purpose whether the manufacturers had something to say about it or not.

And It knew that, too, even if the voice had been silent for quite some time now. Ever since that day in Flux, since she infiltrated Mbale Gond's twisted mind and came out with a name and a place, she was on a witchhunt, because she knew Cierus wasn't the kind of person to play games and stand out in the open waiting for someone to press her shoulder and call it 'tag'. She knew she was a secretive little rat, so Isolde had asked around, done some research, paid big prices to find out exactly what she was up to in this town. And having grown up here herself, she didn't have too much of a problem knowing where to look: the bars, the alleys, the drug-rings. Places she might have been afraid to walk into back when she didn't have terabytes of netrunning technology running under her skin. The ghostkey was of significant value, but Isolde also understood that her processing power had been quite low and that she needed an appropriate operating system to match what her quick-hack list had to offer. So she'd also upgraded to a Mark-7 Arotoshi PLX, which was about as high as most black-market retailers could go. The more powerful stuff belonged to the big names, people that worked for some patchy skin of government, people like… Calyx Ward.

And Isolde knew that Calyx Ward was the only person left to put her plan into action. The woman who pulled all the strings and could make anything happen, could order anything, could build anything.

Even the Seraph Device.

So, once Isolde reached the top of the junkyard's wall, she hopped into her car, which was parked haphazardly next to a new-looking limousine, and drove north, towards the cleaner side of Paxson. The sky had darkened just a touch, and the clouds were piddling rain in explosive bursts rather than steady downpours. It felt uneven, unreal to an extent, but lately everything felt unreal. She tossed the Oni mask aside and let the cool air run through the driver's-side window. She brought the sunvisor down and slid the reflector pad open, and she looked at the reflection. She was sleepy-looking and hadn't eaten well for the past few days; anything she did eat just got vomited up again by that nagging voice, which lately had managed to not only materialise in the realm of cyberspace, or Ourospace, as she learned from Cierus' memory, but also managed to sprout legs in reality. She wasn't hallucinating or anything – she certainly hadn't fallen that far – but with her lack of sleep and diet she was seeing things that she knew couldn't have been real.

Like right now, in one of the back car seats, leaning on her shoulder and whispering into her ear:

That woman will come for you.

Who? Isolde said. Rhea?

She wasn't even shocked anymore. She'd grown used to that voice appearing when she least expected it.

You should have killed her, It said. You should have killed them all when you had the chance.

Some quiet.

Then: Unlike you, I'm not a monster, Isolde said. I kill who I need to, not who I want to. I don't have to be coaxed by a lie like you.

A lie like me? Hmm.... Tell me: was Cormac a need? It said, and for a second It almost sounded like him.

You wouldn't understand how I'm feeling, Isolde said. No one understands – not even the piece of shit that lives in my head like some ghost that thinks it has all the answers.

What I find interesting about you, little Isolde, is that you seem to be under the impression that your grief is your greatest weakness, It said. Where I, oh I, would argue it is your greatest strength. Without it, you're nothing. Without me, you're nothing; you wouldn't even bother getting up in the morning to go to work like all the other people who are spun into the machine and told to like it. No, you would have walked through that door the day you got the job interview invitation, into your apartment to see your daughter's toys and drawings and you would have gone into the kitchen cupboard, grabbed a knife, and slit your fucking throat because you knew that WITHOUT ME, and WITHOUT GRIEF, you would BE NOTHING. A worthless nobody with no job or child or anything that gives you meaning.

And it's hard to hear, It continued, because the human mind cannot comprehend such horror. They put value in meaningless things, like money, like sport, like 'Who can paint the best picture or construct the strongest argument?' Oh, who can make the most money? I want to be like that person. Don't you, Isolde? Don't you just love our species? Where money and KPIs and 'wrong, wrong, wrong' will come before the homeless children on the street? Before your dead, autistic child? Do not sit there and tell me that I am a lie, that I do not exist, because I do. I am all around you, everywhere, and one day, this entire city will see me too. You will make that happen.

Isolde slammed the steering wheel so hard the airbag dislodged. "Shut your fucking mouth!"

The dash flared up with a warning: IMPACT DETECTED – CALLING EMERGENCY SERVICES IN 5… 4… 3…

She tapped the 'cancel' button at the bottom and let out a deep breath. She pressed the underwheel button and the airbag sucked itself back into the slits. She looked up at her reflection in the sunvisor and realised that she had tears in her eyes. She opened the centre console storage lid, grabbed a handkerchief, and started wiping her eyes, wiped a little bit of snot from her nose. "I just miss her so much…" she said, even though she knew, truly, that no one was listening. "She used to hum when she played, just… just hum to herself, like the world didn't exist. And I'd sit there pretending to be busy, but really, I was just listening. Because that sound – God, that sound – it made everything feel okay for once. Like maybe I wasn't a fuck-up. Like maybe I'd done something right. And now it's gone. Just gone. And no one even remembers her but me. No one cares that she's not here."

She gripped the fabric of the handkerchief in her fist, pressing it to her face, breathing through it like a mask. Her chest shook once, twice.

"I don't want revenge. I want her. I want her back. I'd burn everything down just to hear her hum again, just to see her eyes look up at me like I was the whole damn sky. But only God can do something like that, and I'm not very sure He exists. Not anymore."

I care, It said. And I want to make it clear to you, that I am not your enemy in all of this. If there is one thing we can agree on, it's that your daughter deserves justice.

She would have never expected such a response from It; for years all she got was abuse, but this... well, it was different. Her face was replaced with focus as she took another deep breath and let her emotions settle. She needed to keep a clear head. There was no use in slowing down now, not when she was so close.

Yeah... so close.

So, she continued on her journey towards the city centre of Paxson in Sector 7. It was a dodgy area and eventually she had to pull off to a side-parking lot because she knew farther down all the roads were pedestrianised. She could see it from here, as she stepped out of her car and locked it with a subtle beep. Guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles. Buildings that had more than likely been broken into, if not burnt down in some act of defiance against Calyx Ward's reign. A truck backing down the central road and into an industrial field, a big olive-coloured army truck. More than likely hauling the next generation of Lumina, of yellow Ghostfire. You know, to keep the sick man's endeavour endeavouring.

But she ignored it and headed deeper into town, passing out all the people on the roads, all the children and beggars and patrons coughing up what little eddies they had left to merchants that would only spend them to make more. She stopped outside the Merry's Grotto hotel, pressed her scanner card to the door, and buzzed herself in. Finally back, with its harshly dressed guests that looked more like tenants on a bad string of luck than anything else. And that smell: that rank, septic-tank odour they hadn't yet found a solution to or even bothered trying to find a solution to. She walked across the drab carpet, past the employee slumping on her palm behind the reception desk, and caught the elevator up to the third floor. Another buzz of her key-card, and in she went. It was a small hotel room, eerily brown with only one sofa chair, grey sheets across a single-sized bed, and an ever-encroaching scent of old newspaper. Where that came from, she could not tell, but it sure as hell wasn't nice. Must have sept into the walls so deeply that no amount of cleaning would ever beat it out.

Isolde walked into the bathroom, washed the grime and tears off her face, finding her eyes to be ruddy and sore-looking, before taking a sip of water from the sink and heading back into the hotel room. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the OS systems. One of them read clearly on its spine, 'Netshield Industrial – Mk. 10', while the other, as expected, as hoped, read: 'Ourovane'.

This was it. Ourovane, in the palm of her hand. Finally, after all this time, she'd found it.

She rolled back the sleeve of her shirt, clenched, and released the projection rig on her right arm, skin parting not like skin, but like a drawer she'd opened a hundred times before, a tiny hiss escaping as the panel clicked free and the slot revealed itself. The chip sat in her palm, small and humming faintly with blue light, the word OUROVANE etched into its side like a threat, like a promise. She didn't hesitate. She pushed it in, and the socket swallowed it with a wet click, the light flaring once, then steady. For a moment, she sat there, feeling the temperature of her bones shift, her nerves hum, her heartbeat double. Ourovane was in. It was hers now.

And, finally, oh finally, she was ready to have a conversation with it.