Against Gravity (8 page)

“Absolutely.” Kendrick nodded. “I’m sorry,” he added. “I was just a little—”

“I understand.” Hardenbrooke paused, then, “I’ll be frank, Mr Gallmon, technically you should be dead.”

A look of alarm crossed Kendrick’s face. “Hang on there.” Hardenbrooke raised a finger. “What I’m saying is, this is something I’ve never even heard about
before, even among Labrats with totally runaway augmentation growth. This, Mr Gallmon, is unique. I need you to tell me everything you can before we go any further.”

Well, maybe not everything
, Kendrick thought as he began. “There were . . . hallucinations, a little like before.” He outlined some of the details. Hardenbrooke was already
familiar with the visions of butterfly-winged children.

“Anything else?”

Kendrick thought of Peter McCowan. But the ghost – wasn’t there a better word? – had warned him against Hardenbrooke. Was that just some figment of Kendrick’s own
anxieties?

But then, figments of one’s imagination didn’t necessarily give out warnings about bombs in suitcases either. Seeing men who’d been dead for years – that was something
Kendrick was more than willing to keep to himself for the moment.

“That’s it: I collapsed twice, I saw things, and my heart stopped working.” He laughed nervously. “Nothing unusual, really.”

“Look, you have to remember your augmentations are—”

“Inherently unpredictable,” Kendrick finished for him. “I know.”

Hardenbrooke shrugged, and made an adjustment to the couch so that Kendrick found himself staring upwards into a complicated array of lenses and sensors suspended from the ceiling.

Hardenbrooke picked up one of the spray ’derms and paused. “We’re in unknown territory here,” he said. “I want you to understand that.”

Kendrick nodded. “I do.”

Hardenbrooke touched the ’derm to the inside of Kendrick’s bare elbow. Kendrick felt a curious coolness spread along his arm, a sensation with a peculiarly synaesthetic quality to
it, as if he could taste peppermint through his skin.

This faded quickly. Twisting his head round slightly, Kendrick watched as the medic unrolled a blank eepsheet and hung it from a hook screwed into the wall. Next he picked up a slim plastic wand
that looked even more out of date than Kendrick’s own. He pointed it first at Kendrick, then at the blank eepsheet.

Kendrick could see the eepsheet clearly from where he lay. Its surface strobed for a moment before resolving into a cloud of brightly coloured pixels spreading rapidly across a field of black.
There was a vague sense of form and pattern to the movement of the pixels.

Kendrick realized that Hardenbrooke had just injected him with a form of nanite – vat-grown molecular machines that would provide a wealth of information about what was happening inside
his body. This process extended to real-time visuals and, over the next minute or so, the blurry mass of pixels resolved itself into a distinctly human-like shape.

Kendrick twisted his head around so he could watch Hardenbrooke, who was meanwhile keeping an eye on the other eepsheets mounted above his workspace. Kendrick gazed with uneasy fascination at
the outline of his own heart, the major blood arteries already clearly delineated by the flood of information flowing from Hardenbrooke’s nanites.

Now other ’sheets had started to display full-colour video images of his blood vessels – from the inside. Tumbling camera views spun by arterial walls, and he caught occasional
glimpses of smooth, metallic grey where, in any normal unaugmented person, there should have been no such thing.

The first time Kendrick had seen these pictures, he’d expected them to make him uneasy. It could be a hard thing to get a high-definition tour of the sack of meat and blood that made up
your body. Instead, he felt strangely reassured by it. He was still clearly human, whatever might be happening inside his body. He suspected that the reason the medic was letting him see these
images was to make him feel involved in the consultation process, a psychological ploy intended to make it seem as if they were engaged together in a journey of mutual discovery.

Hardenbrooke didn’t actually need to witness any of this process himself since it was the correlated post-examination data that the nanites provided which really mattered. But Kendrick was
strangely glad of it all the same. He thought of the nanites as tiny agents of positive change, even though they comprised the same kind of technology as his augmentations. The “good”
nanites roamed through his body like microscopic policemen, making sure that everything was in order and that no rowdy augments were stirring up trouble deep within his organs.

On-screen the augmentations showed up as red patches, mostly clustered around his spine and major organs, which manifested as blue. Countless red filaments spread up the tube of his neck,
reaching deep into his skull. More filaments surrounded the meat of his brain like a wire cage. There were also segments of red scattered throughout his lungs, his kidneys, through every major
organ. Kendrick peered, straining to see if anything had visibly altered. Every now and then one of the video images afforded him fresh glimpses of the artificial organisms that had taken root in
his flesh.

But they were also intrinsically part of him, whether he wanted them or not. He thought back to the nightmares that had assailed him, ever since his incarceration in Ward Seventeen, of fine grey
filaments extruding from his body like stilettos.

Hardenbrooke too watched the progress on the screen, then turned back to him.

“Your heart . . .”

Kendrick sat up abruptly, the electronic map of his body on the screen changing in response, shifting, twisting and blurring as he shifted onto the edge of the examination couch.

Hardenbrooke picked up another spray ’derm, one on which Kendrick noticed a sticky label with fine, tiny cursive handwriting. But the label was angled away from him, making it impossible
to decipher the words.

Hardenbrooke held it up. “How much did I tell you about this stuff?”

“Last time I was here, you said it was something new from the States.”

“Do you remember our other little chat, when we first met, about the current legal status of what’s inside this?”

Kendrick took a deep breath. “Yes, I do.”

“Remember what I said then, how this is strictly experimental? You know how tight the guidelines are regarding biotechnologies like these.”

“But you’re sure it’s safe?”

Hardenbrooke sighed. “It’s probably no worse than what you’ve already got inside you. I’m not going to give you any guarantees or false promises, but there’s every
chance you’ll keep getting better. This stuff has already successfully stabilized much of the augmentation activity inside you.”

“But it is working,” Kendrick insisted. “I’m getting better. I know I am.”

“And you say you’ve suffered two seizures in rapid order. Perhaps that’s a sign of change – perhaps even positive change.”

“But what about my heart? What’s happened to it? I need to know,” Kendrick demanded, his mind going numb.

Hardenbrooke pinched his nose between two fingers and closed his eyes, pondering. “I’d need to analyse the information downloaded from the nanites and try to get some grip on exactly
what’s happened to you but, from what I’ve seen, it’s clear your heart’s been bypassed in some way. There are new structures inside you. My guess is – and I stress the
word
guess
– is that the new structures are now controlling the flow of your blood.”

Kendrick absorbed this information without comment. Hardenbrooke had only told him what he’d already suspected, yet hearing it confirmed in this way stirred up a darkness deep inside him,
something shrill and insane that was fighting to get loose. He pushed it back down.

“I urge you to remember that this is no reason to start worrying,” Hardenbrooke reminded him.

Kendrick laughed, hearing the edge of hysteria there. “Not worry? I’m not to
worry
about it? Are you crazy?”

“Mr Gallmon, I never had reason to ask this before, but is there any history of heart problems in your family?”

“What does that have to do with anything? I . . .” Then he remembered an aunt who’d died of a coronary. His mother had also suffered a mild heart attack in her early forties.
“Some, yes, I have to admit. But why do you ask now?”

“Your augments integrate with your nervous system and major organs, changing them as they do so, like soldiers building a fort out of whatever material they can find. They respond strongly
to perceived threats and, to a very great degree, they come up with their own definitions of what they regard as a threat. That could include medical conditions.”

Kendrick was thunderstruck. “Wait a minute, are you saying I . . . you mean I had a
heart attack
? That’s what this is all about?”

“I’m saying just imagine, if you will, that your augmentations reacted to a heart attack, or some kind of coronary event, by taking over your heart’s functions. I’m not
saying that’s what it is. I’m only saying that’s my best guess for now. If I were you, I’d thank my lucky stars.”

“My heart—?”

“Has been bypassed, but you’re very much alive. Focus on that: it means your augments are working for you, instead of against you.” Hardenbrooke held up the ’derm again.
“So let’s make sure things stay that way.” He leaned over and injected its contents into Kendrick’s arm while Kendrick glanced over the medic’s shoulder at the
pixellated views of his own internal organs.

Hardenbrooke stood up straight again and smiled. “Remind me, then: have we had this conversation?”

Kendrick sighed. “No, we haven’t.”

“Have I ever set eyes on you before?”

“No, you’ve never seen me before in your life. To suggest otherwise would mark me as a scoundrel and a lunatic.”

“Just so we know where we stand, I’ve introduced new nanites into your body, which will implant their own override algorithms in your augments.”

“So that’ll at least delay things for a while?”

“To be honest, it might even cure you.”

“That’s impossible. You can’t be ‘cured’ of augmentations. They don’t just go away.”

“What can be made can be unmade,” Hardenbrooke replied. “Remember, experimental tech, but so far, so good. Right?”

Kendrick gazed soberly back at the medic. If Hardenbrooke was in any way lying, it was the cruellest kind of lie: an offering of hope where hope had not previously existed. It occurred to
Kendrick that he wasn’t really prepared to believe what Hardenbrooke was telling him now, simply because he couldn’t cope with any more disappointment.

“You are aware,” Kendrick framed his words carefully, “that if this really works like you suggest, it would be the biggest news of the century.”

“I never said it was a definite cure. It’s a
possible
cure, using experimental technology that doesn’t even officially exist. Apart from getting me deported and jailed,
if the authorities found out that your augments had turned rogue and that you had been taking these treatments they’d throw you straight into a secure nanohazard ward, and you’d
disappear as far as the rest of the world is concerned.”

Kendrick felt his face flush red. Yet, for the first time in a very great while, he dared to hope. The simple reality of it was that, without Hardenbrooke, and without the possibility that
Hardenbrooke was extending to him . . . without that, he had nothing.

12 October 2096
Edinburgh

Once, when Marlin Smeby had still been young, his maternal grandmother had taken him on a kind of Grand Tour of Europe. At that time, back home in Florida, his parents had
been busy yelling and screaming their way towards a grisly divorce. By that stage the family was already rich from his father’s lucrative engineering contracts with the governments of various
minor Asian nations looking to rebuild after their nuclear squabbles of the 2080s.

The jaunt had given him a taste for travelling, which had led to a spell serving in the old US Army. This in turn had led on to intelligence work, which had led to Marlin’s discovery that
he had himself inherited every bit of his father’s ingrained cruelty and utter disregard for his fellow human beings. To him, Edinburgh had felt like it belonged in some other time, with its
ancient brooding castle and those grey stone tenements squatting on steep hillsides.

Still, much had changed since then, and it was no longer the city he remembered from his previous visit. Even as a child he’d been able to see how much bankruptcy had affected Europe. The
old EU had almost given up the ghost, but hadn’t yet been replaced by the monolithic European Legislate that had risen from its ashes. He remembered people in their thousands sleeping in the
parks and streets because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Smeby looked out of the taxi window and realized he could quickly tell which of the city’s inhabitants were American. It was something in the way they dressed, the way they carried
themselves. He wondered if they still considered themselves to be American. Did they all talk of going back home once things got better, or would they finally give up and decide they were now
Europeans?

A smear of graffiti strobed across a wall, its hue flickering from green to red to yellow;
Fuck off back to the US
, someone had scrawled. Another read
Europe for the Europeans
.

Smeby sat back and let a smile steal across his features.
Europe for the Europeans
? Not so long ago it would have been
Britain for the British
, or maybe
France for the
French
. Their mutual hatred for the flood of American refugees had finally driven the Europeans to embrace each other as brothers.

“Mr Hardenbrooke, I trust you are doing well?”

Hardenbrooke nodded and smiled as best he could, given his difficulties in that area. There was a distinctly pale flush to his skin, Smeby thought: he was clearly nervous about something.

“Business is good,” Hardenbrooke replied, glancing around Smeby’s hotel suite. Draeger’s money had secured him an entire floor of the Arlington, a large part of it taken
up by the conference room in which Smeby had arranged for them to meet.