Shyft Read online

  Or wearing a beaver skyn, anyway—she is a Fleshmith. Making bodies is her trade. And by the looks of it, she’s earned her spot on Standards hit list. Her fur is an oiled chestnut brown and her broad greyish muzzle twitches in a beatific expression over her long orange teeth as she basks in the unnatural display below her.

  I’d be amazed at the sight of her—if a giant beaver in a cocktail dress wasn’t the least mundane of everything going on in front of me. Each of the dancing creatures is wholly unique and completely improbable. Affronts to the theory of evolution.

  Or testaments to it.

  One creature bonelessly sways its elongated limbs and bulbous grey-green head, like dancing sea kelp.

  Further up the pyramid a two-headed woman with four arms and three legs entwines a pair of naked figures, each with organs glowing through semi-transparent skin, all of them engaged in what would be a physically impossible sex act if the female hadn't come equipped with two vaginas.

  Soaring above the dance floor a female skyn, her lithe body hardly bigger than a toddler’s but with a sharp jade beak jutting from her face, pupil-less black eyes, and iridescent green feathers sprouting from giant wings, flitters in tight circles. A gruesome canary in a cage.

  There’s more of them. Fifteen or sixteen by my count.

  I had no idea.

  That cypher I chased in the Market—sure, she ran like a gazelle and probably could have torn my arms off—at least she was human. Another Chinese girl, could have been anybody. She blended in. Passed for normal.

  But these things. With the right lighting and music, they could each star in their own horror vid. Instead, they’re dancing. These aren’t nightmares, this is a party. Humans not allowed.

  I may look like a person, but I’ve been staring at these creatures long enough to study each one of them, while barely a few seconds have passed out there.

  I may not look like them, but I fit right it.

  Through all their differences there’s one thing that unites them—small discs at the bases of their skulls, or whatever passes for their skulls. Just like the tank downstairs.

  Makes me wonder why Kade hasn’t sent her muscle down after us yet. Maybe she’s waiting for her show to end.

  I reload my weapon, hold it down at my side. Whatever’s holding the security team up, it won't be long. No way Kade goes to all the trouble to create specialized slaughter skyns and then passes up an opportunity to show them off.

  My body’s tense, muscles tight, but with the Revv I feel an odd sense of calm instead of anxiety. I should be worried, but I’m not.

  I’m not even worried that I’m not worried. I can handle this.

  The pyramid is the only source of light on this floor, but as my eyes eventually adjust I start to make out more details in the wide open room around it. Bare concrete pillars are sprayed with the gossamer gauze of buckystrut webbing, but the conversion process must have halted before the concrete could be dissolved. Thick cables run from battery hubs. Med pods stand further back, lining the walls in both directions as far as I can see.

  Could be a hundred of them, could be more.

  As I'm watching the stasis lights on one of the pods begins to flash, slowly at first but then with increasing speed until the door puffs open and a blue-scaled lizard comes awake with a revolting shiver that ripples from its jaw though its naked humanoid torso and dissipate in its thick tail. It tastes the air with its long yellow tongue, leaps out, hangs in the air for a while, then lands on clawed toes and scurries silently toward the show.

  The pyramid dims and a spotlight catches the lizard as it bounds up the pyramid, massive rear legs pumping up five steps at a time, then hits the apex and vaults up and above the catwalk, pulls itself into a spin and makes a three-point landing, left arm thrown out.

  The crowd, safe behind glass, cheers as the floor clears and the lizard scythes through an elaborate sequence of flips, spins and gyrations, a reptile version of capoeira, before, without warning, it bunches up on its hind legs, springs, and bounces off the glass wall to catch the fluttering bird-woman in its long jaws, somersaults once in the air and land on all fours.

  Blood streams from the lizard’s mandibles, broken wings twitch in its mouth. The bird woman’s completely limp. Doesn’t make a sound. I’m not sure there’s anyone in there anymore.

  From beyond the glass the crowd responds with a chorus of approval I feel more than hear and then the tabs come out. Observers on every side of the glass tap and swipe through a frenzy of bidding until it slows to a long back and forth between a man and woman on opposite sides of the glass cube surrounding the stage.

  Finally, after a taut volley of offers and counter-offers punctuated by tense stares across the sea of freaks watching from below, the man acquiesces. The woman nods. She just bought herself a new lizard. Or the skills of the person who created it.

  Everyone looks to Kade.

  One of the tanks offers a tab and the beaver acks it with a tap of her furry paw. She twitches her whiskers at the winning bidder as she backs away from the window.

  As the lizard carries the limp bird down the pyramid and slithers back into the dark, Kade finally decides it’s time for the next part of the show, and sends her security after us.

  So this is how she wants to play it. Fine with me. If Kade wants a show, I’ll give her one.

  I push Galvan back against the elevator wall. “Stay here,” I say, emphasizing each word. “I mean it.”

  I wait for him to give me a wide-eyed nod before I step out of the elevator and into the discordant sound of a symphony warming up.

  The creatures notice me as I start up the stairs, taking my time, and they slide, shuffle or hop out of my way. One of the tanks has left Kade’s side and is descending a flight of stairs from its boss’ observation post to the wide dance floor at the peak of the ziggurat.

  Two of the smaller monkey-figures from the roof bound down the steps behind him, moving quickly, springing side to side on powerful haunches like stimmed-up chimps, using the tank and the dancers and the walls as leverage to stay airborne, barely touching the ground as they spread out to flank me.

  They're half-size versions of the tank, hairless nubs for heads, flat noses, non-existent ears. Hands and feet the same three-finger, two-thumb combo. The main difference is their compact bodies—lean, coiled tight under form-fitting blue stopsuits.

  I reach the apex of the pyramid and stop, the steep steps yawning down behind me, weapon quivering in my hand. The whole process takes seconds on the world and minutes in my head.

  Then, I don’t know if it’s the adrenaline or something else, but the Revv kicks into a new gear.

  The tank slows until its motion becomes imperceptible, nostrils flaring with breath like eruptions of an annual geyser. Blinks wax and wane. The chimps hang in mid-air behind it like museum pieces.

  Kade is relaxed in her chair, webbed feet dangling a half meter off the ground, ears perked, whiskers quivering in what I’d guess is a sign of beaverly contentment.

  Nothing happens for what feels like a long time, the security skyns moving in geological timescales, then I lift my arm and a ghost version moves up from my body while my real arm stays exactly where it is. I bring my ghost-hand to my face, flex it.

  I take a step and leave my body behind.

  As I do, ghost versions of the tank and two monkeys extrude from their bodies, moving to intercept me.

  Another step and the ghosts’ movements blur. One more and they become indistinct.

  This is the Revv. It’s projecting where the advancing skyns are going to be. Calculating their trajectories. Predicting the future.

  My Cortex is moving so fast, it can figure out what’s going to happen while it’s still happening. But only so far. Just a second or so in advance. The probabilities must get too fuzzy much further out.

  I step back and the skyns rewind too, sucked back into their real-world forms that continue to approach a millisecond at a time.

&nb
sp; I can play with time.

  Holy fuck.

  This is going to be even easier than I thought.

  I spend what seems like a half hour playing with simulations, running through options while my Revved Cortex extrapolates the real-world response. In the end, after taking the skyns head-on a dozen different ways, with all of them resulting in some form of me on the receiving end of bludgeoning and dismemberment, I settle on a simpler plan.

  I forget the tank, track the two chimps. Let the Revv anticipate their movements.

  They’re going to get here first, so I'll take them first.

  Their bodies are completely protected, hands and feet covered with stopsuit material. Who knew it was possible to buy bulletproof boots and gloves for oversized, two-thumbed, three-fingered hands and feet? Just goes to show you can get anything on the link.

  But I’m not aiming for their bodies.

  Tired of waiting, I let time slip until the chimps get close enough they decide to launch their attack. They leap high, bouncing off the glass to come from opposite directions, aiming to land on either side of me, grab my arms, and use their momentum to drag me to the ground. Then the tank will be on me and it’ll be all over.

  Except, no.

  I step as far into the Revv as I can and wait until they reach the apex of their flight. They hang there, offering themselves up as targets. The ghost version of me—the me that’s living a half-second in the future—raises my weapon, lines up a perfect shot and fires, swings, aims, and fires again. Then I stop and let the real world catch up.

  Behind me, I walk into where I’m standing now, lift my gun arm as the monkeys fall toward me, then bulls-eye the antennas out the backs of their necks.

  Their faces have no time to register shock or surprise, they don't grab their throats in pain or attempt to stop the blood, their skyns just go limp in the air, sail past me and crumple down the pyramid stairs.

  Only metres away now, expecting me to be on the ground and struggling, the tank stops his advance and narrows his eyes at me. I lunge into the Revv, and ghost-me takes two running steps and jumps, knee-up, aiming for his hazy sternum, while the ghost-tank reaches up to catch me.

  I’m living in two places at once. In the now and in the staggered future, seeing everything from two vantage points but still, somehow, able to make sense of it all.

  Back in the present, the music swells, instruments reaching a crescendo of anticipatory tunelessness. My body starts to move.

  In the future, the Revv figures the tank will catch me, both hands around my waist.

  My body’s in the air. The tank brings his hands up. A smile splits his fleshy skull.

  He doesn’t know he’s already caught me, and I’ve already grabbed the back of his head with my right hand, put my weapon to his throat and put a bullet through his transmitter.

  Killed the signal controlling his skyn.

  He’s dead and he doesn’t even know it.

  Time catches up and the bullet hits and the tank drops. I ride him down to his back. As he falls, he takes us onto the center of the dance floor and finally the tuneless symphony bursts into song, allowing me to hear the same driving beat that the dancers have been gyrating to.

  He hits the ground with a crashing thud and I let myself continue forward, roll off his torso and back up to my feet. The crowd roars around me and this time I hear it.

  The soundtrack of invincibility.

  My skin is tingling. My body flush with pseudo-endorphins, like I just had an orgasm. Like I’m flying.

  Like I can do anything.

  This is amazing. I never want it to end.

  With this stuff amping up my head, I’m gonna have Connie’s killer found by the weekend.

  Kade is standing, one paw pressed against the glass, muzzle tight over her big front teeth.

  All around her the audience is looking from me to their tabs, still wondering if this is part of the show, until one-by-one, they begin to retreat back from the edge and the glass is clear.

  The elevator doors opened only forty-five seconds ago. I'm standing over the fallen bodies of three combat skyns—skyns I took down effortlessly by stretching my mind into a simulated future—surrounded by astonished demonic Fleshmith art projects overseen by an ambulatory beaver, with the electric tang of weapon discharge still fresh in my nose, and already my joy is fading.

  Now that we're here, I don't even remember why I was so insistent on us coming alone. All that bullshit about needing something to do—I have something to do. I should have let the on-duty team handle this, could have been home trying to zero-in on Connie's killer. I wasted the chance. Spent the Revv on showing up Daar and Brewer.

  We’re not going to get any closer to Xiao. We’re not going to track down the person responsible for psyphoning DeBlanc’s mind from his Cortex.

  What did I think was going to happen, bursting in to a massive party with only Galvan to help? I’d stride up to Xiao, strap the cuffs on and read him his rights?

  Xiao isn’t here. No one’s here. Just me, Galvan, and a bunch of remote control monsters.

  This entire room is one massive Standards violation, and I put the investigations into all of it in jeopardy.

  I should have called this in.

  What was I thinking?

  My feet lift out of my shoes, pull up and out of my body until I'm looking down at my skyn. The other skyns have decided to ignore me, are back to dancing like I don’t exist.

  Maybe I don’t.

  Maybe I've been hovering on this same spot my whole life, drifting in my constituent atoms while the city built itself up around me.

  All I have to do is fly away, leave everything behind.

  I want to. Connie will be looking for me.

  Galvan runs up behind me, his presence snaps me back to reality, drags my feet back to the floor.

  The Revv is messing with my head, spinning it out of control. I can’t concentrate on one thing at a time. I’m ready for it to be over and squeeze my thoughts as far back into real-time as I can, gets me pretty close. My mind contracts and everything around me speeds up.

  I spin around and Galvan averts his eyes, blinks twice, swallows hard.

  “You—” he says, then cuts himself off, shakes his head, turns his back to me and raises his tab, pokes it a few times, then turns back around and raises it like he’s scanning the room. He glances up at me, and then again quickly away. “It’s a wide-band black hole in here,” he says quietly, lowers his tab, pokes it once more, waves it around.

  No comment on how I've just single-handedly taken out three way Past-Standard skyns, but he won’t look at me either.

  “Look at this.” He shows me his tab as if I should know what the image of a half-dozen wavy lines over a giant red bar means.

  “Looks red,” I say.

  “Exactly. This is the link traffic around us right now. There isn’t any. Nothing but the reserved Federal spectrum, a few legacy bands—and one, massive local feed. Kade has the link locked down. Controls the signal in and out.”

  Makes sense. Kade’s filled this place with puppets, he needs room for the strings.

  I tap my tab, calling for the Service AMP but there’s no response. The signal icon is non-existent. “We can’t use our tabs,” I say. “The strike teams won’t be able to communicate. The AMP can’t run the lawbots.”

  “Those discs on the skyns’ necks. She must be utilizing the entire spectrum to stream the Rithms,” he says breathlessly as if he’s just realised the implication of what he’s saying. It only took massively amping up my brain to get to the same place he did two seconds earlier than him. “But even with no competing traffic, the bandwidth required to remotely operate the number of skyns in this room alone would be more than enough to max out the capabilities of the entire data spectrum.” He kneels down, swivels the tank’s head around. “Skyns usually can’t be remotely operated because the spectrum isn't reliable, they need too much of it. Any kind of signal hiccup and, boom, they c
ould lose their connection. That’s why remote operation of an artificial body is restricted. Well, one reason. Second Skyn launched a test program a few years ago, remember that? Skyns were losing their signals, crashing their cars. Falling down stairs.” He looks around at the skyns still dancing around us. “Rithms cast into this many skyns at once—no, way.”

  He’s emphatic. To him, this isn’t possible.

  He won’t know about impossible until he’s come back from the dead a time or two. “Maybe Kade’s found a way around all that,” I offer, leading him along. That’s the only thing that makes sense.

  If Kade’s figured out a way to reliably control a skyns over the link—it isn’t hard to imagine someone using an ability like that to hurt a lot of people.

  Standards is going to shit.

  “No way,” Galvan says. “They haven’t solved the neural lag problem, let alone the problem of protecting bandwidth to allow enough sensory data to render a life-like experience. Especially one designed for the fast reflex times of a combat skyn. And even with the link’s entire bandwidth isolated there could still be problems in routing—unless…”

  “Unless?” He’s figured out how it works. See Galvan, nothing’s impossible. Even anonymous threats and evidence deleted from the link have an explanation. It’s just a matter of working through the facts until you find it.

  “Unless they weren’t streaming,” Galvan looks excited, the prospect of dying at the hands of a beefed-up skyn forgotten. “Oh, wow. I’ve heard rumours but I never thought—we’re going to have to get these back to the lab. Standards is going to flip out.”

  “Them and everyone else,” I say. This is all way more than I had anticipated. We're definitely going to catch hell when this is all over.

  “Galvan,” I say, and nudge him with my foot.

  The music slows and warps into a trumpeting fanfare. Kade’s left her observation post and is padding down the stairs using a chewed-off branch as a walking stick, her stout body balanced precariously over stubby hind legs, her scaly tail dragging behind her. Another of the tanks follows closely, its eyes wary.

  I tighten my grip on my weapon and get ready to crank the Revv back up.