Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project) Read online

  They obey; they have discovered a formula and no matter the variables, following Isyavan leads to survival – that is the constant. Their casualties never had time for this formula or for her, and that is proof of concept in itself. Obedient doesn’t mean unquestioning, but questions can be postponed for a more appropriate time.

  They march on. Even their direction is dictated from afar, their course selected by their operators. Who may be dead, a possibility they have nursed and gnawed on, tasting its shape and texture, licking at it like a wound. During the march they focus; during downtime there isn’t much else to do but let their minds wander. The idea of fucking to pass the time has occurred to most of them, but none of them appeals to each other that way and in any case there’s no space or opportunity. Tarasi would have slept with their lost commander but there was never privacy, so they simply made promises for after and one day with twined hands.

  When Tarasi finds herself humming that same tune she quickly stops. Isyavan’s rule of engagement: always forget, always bury, always discard. The easiest thing to do; recall naturally sifts over itself like wind-stirred detritus, effortless.

  But still, “What was that?” demanded as though Isyavan has the answer to everything.

  And as though she does, she says, “Mass paracusia. Our receptors glitched.”

  Rimael’s chin juts. “Really?” He ignores Haduan’s hand on his back, cautioning, reminding.

  She turns to him, her gaze indifferent. “Do you actually want to think about it, or do you just want to pick a fight, Rimael?”

  He quiets, comes to heel.

  Seventieth comes and passes, a day the precise hue of mourning. They celebrate a little. Twenty left, which – subsequent to what they’ve been through – is hardly anything. The concept of life beyond now, a time outside the desert, slowly accretes strata of potential like sediment.

  Until the theory of obedience to Isyavan fails and reverts to mere hypothesis, or less.

  The beast comes at night, the shape of a spider, the taste of carbon-rot and melanoma. The voices in that shredded tune, looping endlessly through cracked speakers.

  If anyone is distracted it should have been Tarasi, but perhaps it is easy to ignore the dead when they don’t call to you. And even then, when the spider murmurs “Rimael?” it is quiet, bemused, like it doesn’t quite know the date, where it is, what it is.

  A cry for help, a withheld breath wracked with pain: any of that and the outcome might have been different. But this blank distance, this puzzlement as of one shaking off sleep, gives pause.

  He pauses too long, is cut in half by the scythe-swing of an arachnid leg. From throat to groin, exact and with a machine’s joyous attention to symmetry.

  It is the first time their certainty falters, their coordination slips. Isyavan is answer and salvation. She’s not supposed to lead them astray; she’s not meant to let them die.

  She never sends up a rallying cry. Simply she presses on, shearing off a leg, hammering in an eye. Like she never registered Rimael turning to sparks and circuit, the synaptic links between prostheses and skin snapping in blood and sealant. Or, Tarasi would think afterward, like she’s fighting alone, counting on nothing but herself; that at the centrifuge of survival there is only – has always been only – Isyavan. Everything else is incidental byproduct.

  Haduan and Tarasi do their parts, anyway. Tearing up old relics sutured together by ancient code has become second nature, so much so that like Isyavan they hardly miss a beat. Suppleness and speed, all habit.

  Isyavan offers two choices. Taking neither has never been an option, just as taking neither death by the deep or death by the sun wasn’t one. The prison has taught them well about life.

  RIMAEL TALKED TOO much, but he gave voice to the others’ fears. Down to three, it’s much easier for two to conspire against and doubt the third. At four, Rimael provided balance.

  As three they collect the parts of him that they can find, tangled up in the briars of arachnid limbs and crown of still-swiveling optics. There hasn’t been time for him to solidify, to pass in some semblance of dignity. No resinous shards for Isyavan to break and keep, only curlicues of his fluids drying on spider carapace.

  She digs and pries until she has his heart in its nest of connectors and guttering power. She cracks open his skull until she has the container that holds his brain, a complicated shell of receptors and transmitters, miniature network that intermediates between implants and flesh, thought and data.

  Haduan and Tarasi draw low, harsh breaths. Even knowing what is inside them, having seen the blueprints after the surgery, the actuality of their parts confronts: unspeakable, unignorable. Isyavan never tore to rags the ones who died fresh, only those that went away rotting in their sleep. Perhaps there was a reason, in the end, other than qualms about touching fat and still-hot lymph.

  “I’m taking this with me,” she says, of the heart and the brain.

  “Could he be put in... something else?”

  Isyavan looks at Haduan.

  Who says in a small tight voice, “I just thought of prostheses – since we are...”

  She cups the wet heart in one hand, the breadth of her palm swallowing it, and cradles the cardiac shell in the crook of her elbow. “These are lumps of meat,” she says. “Soon, not even that. We aren’t what you think. It’d be easier and prettier, but we’re stuck with this. One body. One chance. Better make the most of it.”

  “Even if we get out,” Tarasi says, in a voice of receding distance, “how are we going to be?”

  “When you get to that, you can think and philosophize. Evaluate how you’ll get reintegrate into normal life then. Now’s not the time.”

  EIGHTY-SECOND AND HADUAN falls.

  Not to one of the metal veterans; not even to the desert’s relentless will. Perhaps it was meant from the start, the acceleration of his metabolism automatic, and his fate predetermined – the length of its string, the moment of cutting short. He goes on watch. By the time Tarasi relieves him she finds him gobbling up sand by the fistful.

  She tries to stop, reverse his course; she slaps him and pounds his back. It is pointless. When Isyavan joins them she only watches, her mouth closed, her expression occluded by the sheath of artifice that turns her apparent surface to rough clay. Haduan doesn’t last. No amount of implants can harden a body against ingesting the desert directly, in such quantity.

  Isyavan takes only his brain. Tarasi doesn’t cry – they’ve been modified to squander as little fluid as possible, stoppered glands and redirected sweat. Efficient and self-contained. In any case she is above weakness. Their commander didn’t drive her to weep, and Haduan wouldn’t. Be here long enough and all feelings are polished off until the mind is stone-smooth, the face a mannequin’s.

  Down to two of them, the carrier is empty. It pushes inexorably on. To leave it is to be left behind, without map or navigation, with no sense of direction but the twitching tendons of memory. Those may not be trusted.

  Down to two of them, Tarasi finally speaks what she’s always swallowed back until it lodges deep in her stomach, growing heavy and tumorous. “At the end of this, we will be extracted. Won’t we?”

  “In eight days the carrier stops and puts us at the rendezvous point. In theory, there’ll be a shuttle and it will fly us out. We will get medical attention if required. We’ll get financial compensation, enough to set us up modestly; if they’re feeling generous the two of us will receive the stipend originally due the entire squad.” Isyavan’s sheathing has retracted, leaving her unarmored. Her face is only slightly less unfeeling than her respiratory mask. Her vital rhythms are even, machine-regular. “It’s all in the documents we signed. You read them back to back like the rest of us did, I’m sure. Paying attention to all the minutiae and clauses, like any good academic.”

  “This close to the end you might as well –” Tarasi shudders, steadies. “You owe us.”

  Isyavan’s hands close. Open. A mesh of reinforcement over
fingers and knuckles and palms, not quite gloves, not entirely melded with skin. Out of the desert they will have to be cut open again, the obvious protective shielding sloughed off, their nervous and digestive systems rewired a second time to normal. For a certain definition. “Those old engines.” A twitch of fingers: nerves, fear, a tic. “They’re used to following orders. The way we transmit back home fits the communication patterns these relics knew. So they come to us looking for guidance; that’s why they have picked up bits of us, a voice here, a memory there. Just fragments, though. People can’t exist as data. That’s wishful thinking, an ancient fantasy. We’ll never outlast our flesh. When that ends, so do we.”

  Tarasi does not begin to protest that Isyavan should have told them that long ago; she does not begin to feel disappointment, rage, betrayal. Now is not the time. It’s never the time for anything here but the resolve to exist: another breath drawn, another dawn met. “Then they should tag us friendlies.”

  “To them – and understand, this is by design – our weapon and maintenance signatures match hostile parameters. It confuses them, and in the face of ambiguity they’re hardcoded to attack.” Isyavan’s hands flex, curling. “I helped outline the project, develop some of the protocols that make us both their commanders and their targets. Without that, we would have been able to just walk through the dunes unmolested and there wouldn’t have been much of a test for our augmentations. They hunt and scavenge each other for spare parts; what would they care about human trespassers? Their war was long over.”

  “And you are here –”

  “As punishment. Perhaps I came to an ideological crisis, could no longer ignore my conscience. Perhaps they sent into the desert someone I cared about instead of faceless convicts, the way it was supposed to be. Make up your own reason, Tarasi, and pick the most romantic if that helps.”

  The intake of Tarasi’s breath is the sound of razors sliding open silk. “They’ve never gone for you first. It seemed like incredible luck, but that’s why we all followed you.”

  “After taking hostile action I’m a target, like anyone else. And the first ten days I was a target period, like the rest of you. It took time to reverse-engineer.” Isyavan glances, sideways. “You don’t seem outraged.”

  Tarasi has turned her gaze elsewhere, sight joined umbilical to the carrier’s cameras. Which see nothing, only its own shadows and exhaust tracks. “One body, one chance. You’re the best odds I have left. I’ll take that. Except you never needed us, did you? From the eleventh day if you’d just let us die, it would have been easier for you.”

  “It wouldn’t have. You’re wrong about that. I’m only human.”

  They take turns on the carrier’s roof, waiting out the tranquil ruinscape, surface tension hiding teeth like inevitability, harboring armed chassis older than memory.

  When the sand disgorges the next monster, it is a nightmare of Rimael’s laughter and Haduan’s dreams. Patchwork put together from transmitted communications, from the life before that Haduan remembered in his sleep and kept to himself, broadcast now in the clear. So they see, as they dismantle limbs from muzzle and carve open armor, simple sunlit moments. Breakfast in an office, the sound of rustling paperwork; he was more desk officer than anything else. There is no convenient shorthand – they are not shown intimate fragments of family, formative segments of childhood, something wrenching at the heart.

  But even if they have been, nothing finds purchase on the sheer, frictionless carapace of Isyavan’s will. Sometimes Tarasi thinks she is not so unlike the desert; that Isyavan belongs here, was born to be its match, honed to be its voice.

  EIGHTY-SIXTH WHEN TARASI breaks.

  The epidermal shell, first, cracking in the way of brittle clay and bone gone to osteoporosis. Isyavan notices almost before Tarasi does, says, “Stay in here.”

  Looking down at herself, Tarasi begins to shake. Stops herself, pulls back.

  “Four days. You can make it.”

  “Is this just delayed – is it a killswitch?”

  “I don’t know.” Isyavan thumbs the roof open. The watch will be hers alone, now. “I don’t know everything. I never did.”

  Tarasi doesn’t last four days. Rapid atrophy, faulty implant site, a misaligned muscle enhancement. Isotopic exposure catching up. All of those. They will never know; the diagnostics they send are encrypted, not meant for them to read. Neither their bodies or their sickness are their own. Isyavan thinks of holding Tarasi’s hand as her stomach fills with amber and her lungs fold in on themselves. She has heard that some animals, toward death, seek solitude so the end will come in peace and dignity. Perhaps that will be more appropriate; it’s how she envisions her own. Company will make it no easier. So on the roof she stays, as night falls down a funeral shroud.

  A storm begins after Tarasi has ended. It never looks the same way twice; the phenomenon interferes with their receptors, their communication bands. Must do the same to the engines that have made this land their graveyard and hunting ground, but more so. Unlike them Isyavan knows the sky does not turn quite this shimmering red, the sand does not sprout shoots glistening with dew. The hallucinations fade quickly, in any case, and in their wake the world returns to reassuring emptiness.

  Down to one, it’s easy to feel you are the only reality. Isyavan takes out the pieces she has collected, the shards, the boxed brains and shelled hearts. Her name is written on them, a load of code, a kernel of instruction fashioned and etched over the months. With sufficient determination everything can be reverse-engineered, and a twist of cybernetics or loop of memory module has after all been made to bear data. She merely needed to overwrite.

  She throws them out far and wide, sowing a crop of soldiers that never were.

  NINETIETH AND THE shuttle comes, as promised. This is the one vow unbroken, the one contract fulfilled. It is gunmetal black, a rip in the pure bright pennant of sky. The carrier, in turn, has powered down. Nothing will restart it, though Isyavan doesn’t try. Instead she stretches full length on its roof, and calls.

  At the moment of freedom, the desert grants a choice.

  While it is true the mind does not outlast the flesh, even Isyavan understands the value of remembering. And so when the shuttle touches down, the old veterans come humming the commander’s tune, laughing the way Rimael did, talking in Tarasi’s voice, and dreaming Haduan’s past. The flowers of Isyavan’s planting, fast to spring and bud and bloom.

  They rise on cabled tendons and armored limbs, twined to her will, eager to follow and obey.

  She stands, and all of them are with her, the verity of killing lodged in her like a second heart.

  THERE’S A RAIL link, obviously, connecting this liminal place to the coast at Whitstable, but the mayor and his entourage will arrive by boat. It’s more dramatic that way. Representatives of the airfield construction crews are lined up to greet him. Engineers in hard hats and dayglo orange overalls. Local politicians too, of course. Even those who bitterly opposed this thing’s construction are here for its dedication. The place is a fact now, so they may as well bless it, and in their turn, be blessed.

  It’s early morning, and bitterly cold. Still, the spring light, glinting off glossy black tarmac and the glass curtain walls of the terminal buildings, is magnificent.

  I’m muscling some room for my nephews at the rail of the observation deck, and even up here it’s hard to see the sea. A critical press has made much of the defences required to protect this project from the Channel’s ever more frequent swells. But the engineering is not as chromed or as special as it’s been made out to be: this business of reclaiming land from the sea and, where necessary, giving it back again (“managed retreat”, they call it), is an old one. It’s practically a folk art round here, setting aside this project’s industrial scale.

  The mayor’s barge is in view. It docks in seconds. None of that aching, foot-tap delay. This ship’s got jets in place of propellers and it slides into its decorated niche (Scots blue and English red and
white) as neatly as if it were steered there by the hand of a giant child.

  My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck level: a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.

  The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.

  A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer – of London Pride, of course – on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around – belly big, and such small feet – spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dignity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.

  IT’S FOUR BY the time we’re on the road back to Hampshire and home. The boys are of an age where they are growing curious. And something of my recent nostalgia-fuelled moodiness must have found its way out in words, because here it comes: “So have you had a girl?”

  “It’s not my place. Or yours.”

  “But you were going to wed.”

  The truth is that, like most of us, I serve the commons better out of bed. I’ve not been spat on, but I’ve drunk the Mayor of London’s piss a thousand times, hardly dilute, fresh from the sterile beaker: proof of the mayor’s regard for my work, and for all in Immigration.