Woken Furies

“It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.”

Brasil gri

“Alright.” Natsume held up his hands. “Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be real enough for you.”

Brasil just shrugged and gri

“What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?”

Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail—the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.

“But the bad news cuts both ways,” he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. “That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.”

I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know—that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.

“Over in New Kanagawa,” I said instead, “I heard they’re wiring ripwings with microcam systems. Training them too. Any truth in that?”

He snorted.

“Yeah, they were saying the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago. It was paranoid crabshit then, and I guess it still is now. What’s the point of a microcam in a ripwing? They never go near human habitation if they can avoid it. And from what I recall of the studies done, they don’t domesticate or train easily. Plus more than likely the orbitals would spot the wiring and shoot them down on the wing.” He gave me an unpleasant grin, not one from the Renouncer monk serenity suite. “Believe me, you’ve got quite enough to worry about climbing through a colony of wild ripwings, never mind some sort of domesticated cyborg variety.”

“Right. Thanks. Any other helpful tips?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Don’t fall off.”

But there was a look in his eyes that belied the laconic detachment he affected and later, as he uploaded the data for outside collection, he was quiet in a tightened way that had none of his previous monkish calm to it.

When he led us back down through the monastery, he didn’t speak at all.

Brasil’s visit had ruffled him like spring breezes coming in across the carp lakes in Danchi. Now, beneath the rippled surface, powerful forms flexed restlessly back and forth. When we reached the entrance hall, he turned to Brasil and started speaking, awkwardly.

“Listen, if you—”

Something screamed.

The Renouncer’s construct rendering was good—I felt the minute prickle across my palms as the Eishundo sleeve’s gekko reflexes got ready to grab rock and climb. Out of peripheral vision suddenly amped up, I saw Brasil tense—and behind him I saw the wall shudder.

“Move!” I yelled.

At first, it seemed to be a product of the doorkeeper tapestries, a bulging extrusion from the same fabric. Then I saw it was the stonework behind the cloth that was bulging inward, warped under forces the real world would not have permitted. The screaming might have been some construct analogue of the colossal strain the structure was under, or it might simply have been the voice of the thing that was trying to get in. There wasn’t time to know. Split seconds later the wall erupted inward with a sound like a huge melon cracking, the tapestry tore down the centre and an impossible ten-metre-tall figure stepped down into the hall.

It was as if a Renouncer monk had been pumped so full of high-grade lubricant that his body had ruptured at every joint to let the oil out. A grey-coveralled human form was vaguely recognisable at the centre of the mess, but all around it iridescent black liquid boiled out and hung on the air in viscous, reaching tendrils. The face of the thing was gone, eyes and nose and mouth ripped apart by the pressure of the extruding oil. The stuff that had done the damage pulsed out of every orifice and juncture of limb as if the heart within was still beating. The screaming emanated from the whole figure in time with each pulse, never quite dying away before the next blast of sound.

I found I’d dropped to a combat crouch that I knew was going to be worse than useless. All we could do now was run.

“Norikae-san, Norikae-san. Please leave the area now.”

It was a chorus of cries, perfectly cadenced, as from the opposite wall a phalanx of doorkeepers threaded themselves out of the tapestries and arced gracefully over our heads towards the intruder, wielding curious, spiked clubs and lances. Their freshly assembled bodies were laced with an extrusion of their own that glowed with soft, cross-hatched golden light.

“Please lead your guests to the exit immediately. We will deal with this.”

The structured gold threads touched the ruptured figure, and it recoiled. The screaming splintered and mounted in volume and pitch, stabbing at my eardrums. Natsume turned to us, shouting above the noise.

“You heard them. There’s nothing you can do about this. Get out of here.”

“Yeah, how do we do that?” I shouted back.

“Go back to—” His words faded out as if he’d been turned down. Over his head, something punched a massive hole in the roof of the hall. Blocks of stone rained down, and the doorkeepers flinched about in the air, lashing out with golden light that disintegrated the debris before it could hit us. It cost two of them their existence as the black threaded intruder capitalised on their distraction, reached out with thick new tentacles, and tore them apart. I saw them bleed pale light as they died. Through the roof—

“Oh, fuck.”

It was another oil-exploded figure, this one double the size of the previous arrival, reaching in with human arms that had sprouted huge liquid talons from out of the knuckles and under the nails of each hand. A ruptured head squeezed through and gri

“This is the destiny of the human race, to Upload. We are at our strongest there, we will triumph there.”

I gave up. I shouted back at him.

“Fine. Great. You let me know how that turns out. Jack, Sierra. Let’s leave these idiots to kill themselves and get the fuck out of here.”

We abandoned the two of them in the transfer room. The last I saw of either was the male attendant laying himself on one of the couches, staring straight up while the woman attached the trodes. His face was shiny with sweat, but it was rapt too, locked in a paroxysm of will and emotion.

Out on Whaleback and Ninth, soft afternoon light was painting the blank eyed walls of the monastery warm and orange, and the sounds of traffic hooting in the Reach drifted up with the smell of the sea. A light westerly breeze stirred dust and dried-out spindrizzle spores in the gutters. Up ahead, a couple of children ran across the street, making shooting noises and chasing a miniature robot toy made to resemble a karakuri. There was no one else about, and nothing in the scene to suggest the battle now raging back in the machine heart of the Renouncers’ construct. You could have been forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a dream.