Glitch (21 page)

Uncle Pic began pacing up and down the porch, and Simone watched her father watching him. It was as if Uncle Pic was on the verge of changing his mind or, maybe, ceding a point. He stopped, as if he were tired. He looked out into the darkness. “So now we’re taking children and making them into ghosts?”

“Not all, just some.”

“And the rest?”

“They summon the entities who’ll be our allies.”

“And the games continue.”

Her father nodded.

“You know that boy is not going to be given up right away,” Uncle Pic said.

“Probably not.”

“He’s going to be slaved and we’re going to see him get activated. If he does well, they’ll change him more, and use him to channel the worst sort of evil. It’s clear to me. I’ve always had a knack for knowing their strategy. That’s what you’re waiting on, isn’t it?”

Her father nodded. “I guess.”

“The glad game is now where it’s at, Skip, like you keep telling me. They ain’t contesting us in the field anymore or even in the mainframes. Nope, they’re going to do it in the arena. Easy protocol announcements. Easy rules. Easy winners. I see it like this: Your double wants you. So, you’re going to fight someone heavy in one of the big events in the arena. They’ll bring up Gramgadon to face you, for sure. Since they know the Sterling School will be entering its Alters, I just bet your daughter here will face Mr. Beckwith.”

“Joss?” Simone said. “They’ll make me fight him? He can’t even summon.”

Uncle Pic looked away, again, as if something in the dark had his attention. “He’ll be able to, I bet, before this over, Simone.”

“That’s if we don’t find him first,” her father said

Simone rounded on him “I thought you said—”

“I said he’d be all right.”

Uncle Pic waved at both of them. “Interfacers like him tend to see something
appealing
in the Rogues. Joss may be getting what he wants by being kidnapped.”

“What’s he want?” Simone asked, but she could guess. “He wants to summon?”

“Yep,” her father said, “like you and me and the other Alters.”

Uncle Pic leaned against the porch railing. “Right now what they change into is scary stuff. You get fiddled with enough … and it’s as if critters from outer space come calling. Some helpful, some not.”

“Stop calling them critters,” her father said.
 

“Bottom line, Skippard, is that they like it here.”

“Bottom line, Pic, is that we’re vulnerable without them.”

“What’re you going to do about the boy?”

“Yancey’s people—”

“—will take forever, and you know it. By then, what?”

“Oh, hell, Pic. He’s probably happy as can be.”

“If he’s not?”

“Hell, hell, hell.” Simone’s father looked at her. “You think you can convince that boy to turn his back on the Rogues?”

“Joss? He’s not branded by them anymore,” Simone said.

“I know, but I’m guessing he contacted them.”

“No way!”

“I’m guessing he may have asked for a summoning package.” He rubbed his temples as if he had a headache. “Your mother is going to kill me for this, but you and I are going to try to get Joss Beckwith back.”

“All by ourselves?”

“That’s not all we’re going to do. It’s time you meet the man who killed your brother, Jonen.”

Simone remembered a few pictures of Jonen around the house, the ones her mother hadn’t taken down, but her mother never talked about him anymore. As a young girl, he was on her parents’ lips often, but as time passed, her father’s disappearance caused a change in her mother. It was as if everything that happened before was forgotten. Simone had been told that Jonen had been a young glad-fighter who’d died in the arena, and not rejuved. They never told her why, just that he was too young and that somehow he’d suffered Real Death. Rigon said he didn’t remember much about what happened besides the fact that his older brother didn’t come home one day.

“Was he killed by the man who took Joss?”

Her father turned away. “That man goes by the name his masters gave to him: Gramgadon. He’s been refashioned so many times he doesn’t remember who he was. He rigged a glad fight and killed your brother to get to me years ago. A new fight lord named Zain let Jonen perish and never got him help. You’ll also meet Zain soon enough. He’s on top of the game right now. He’ll be patronizing the exhibition matches, no doubt.”

Uncle Pic bit his lip back with a grimace. “Damn those Rogues. Damn ‘em all.”

“Come on,” her father said, “let’s go, before your mother figures out what we’re doing.”

“Right now?”

“Might as well.”

 
SEVEN

SIMONE LET HER FATHER PULL HER deeper over the Chattahoochee National Forest. She was mentally tired, so she dozed as they flew above the tree line. She would open her eyes and see wooded hills spotted with compact, moonlit fields that ran toward ridges or dropped into ragged gulches. The mountains in the distance were dark, rounded domes lined in mist. It was wilderness, and deserted, and lovely. The Consortium kept development out because, they claimed, nature needed to be protected from humanity. She spotted a few prized dwellings, though—vacation homes for the rich and connected who’d fled the arcologies, people like her parents, and the parents of students at Sterling.

They alighted on the edge of a cornfield. The stalks were taller than her father, and they swayed in the wind. The yellow silk looked like frazzled hair. She and her father began to walk down a row, the green leaves sometimes setting off sparks.

On the other side of the field, they stopped at a split-rail fence full of jagged splinters. It separated the cornfield from a fallow field that looked like it hadn’t been turned in a few seasons. Beyond it, a nice-sized, three-story country home sat on a hill.

“Gramgadon lives there, the little prick,” her father said. “Proof the Consortium is corrupt.”

“Nice house,” she said.

“Paid for by dollars siphoned by the Rogues.”

“Joss is inside?”

“Not sure yet. My bet, by the time Gramgadon had Joss in a car, he was already convincing him that the Consortium brand was a mistake.”

Simone stepped back into the corn to avoid looking like a torch out in a field. She thought it was funny, that if someone peered out a window—maybe someone who always checked under the bed before they went to sleep or who never left a closet door open at night—he or she would see two ghosts looking up at the house.

Her father stepped back as well. “We’ll wait until morning. I doubt he’s returned. Rogueslaves, even lieutenants like Gramgadon, won’t take helicopters, much less low orbit shuttles. Air travel is too conspicuous. The Consortium regulates flying. So, we wait.” He guided her into the cornfield a few feet deeper. “We’ll relax together, father and daughter.”

The two of them floated a few inches off the ground. She wasn’t so tired anymore; she could stay like this all night, just waiting.

“You want to play a game?” her father asked.

“Sure.”

“How good are you at moving fast?”

“Not good at all.”

“Chase me.”

A second later he was gone. He’d darted down one of the rows, trailing wisps of energy. It happened so fast that even with the tracers, she lost him.

How does he do that?

She willed herself to start moving, this time without the requisite lifting of her feet—something she did so people wouldn’t freak out. Most people were bothered seeing her float down the hall, even the other Alters who were used to it, but to move she only had to think
go
.

She started gliding forward with no more speed than if you’d shoved her on roller skates.

A flash of light darted by her. She caught her father’s smile, and turned to follow him. He disappeared into the stalks with a burst of sparkling contrails.

She followed, picking up speed, but couldn’t find the burst she needed to catch him.

He did that again and again. She bit back curses while laughing at the idiocy of trying to follow him. It was as if she were a toddler learning to run, and he an Olympic sprinter.

Soon, she found a rhythm. She couldn’t catch him, but she was able to keep up with his traces. These ethereal ribbons lingered in the air for a few seconds, like rippling water in the wake of a speedboat’s engine. She guided herself in and out of these wakes, the little sparks that triggered no more of a nuisance than if she were running through the field with protective clothing.

He stopped. “It’s all a mind game, Simone. You need to figure out your own way to do these things. I imagine myself going from point A to point B, and I go there. Speed is a result of how much focus you have.”

“Very cool.”

“The sparks are nothing to worry about. You can move through a pool of gasoline and not light anything on fire.”

“I’m
so
over worrying about causing a fire.”

“But you can zap people if you want to.”

“I can?”

“Takes practice to harness it. We’ll worry about that later.” He smiled at her like the good pupil she was.

“You’re training me, aren’t you?”

“My apprentice.”

“I mean ... you don’t want me to get my body back, do you?”

“It’s not that, Simone. If you want a body back, you’ll get it. Because you’ll beat your double into submission. They always mess up. You just have to figure out how to beat them.”

“Like you did.”

“More than once.”

“Why are you still a ghost ... oh, right, you like it.”

“It’s important I learn what the benefits of being disembodied are. It’s the key to understanding all this. Giving my double status lets me see how powerful they can become.”

“
Understanding
...?”

“What we are. I mean, you and I both have doubles in Cyberspace. Those doubles think they’re the real us. You understand.”

“Not really.” She had heard her mother and brother discuss this—what they called the problem of the self. How could two of the same beings exist at the same time? Ghosting created doubles of a self. This was a challenge for people like her father and mother who thought about those issues.

“When your brother, Jonen, died, I was devastated. No life should ever be lost. We’re at a place now where we can, almost with proper fidelity, keep the essence of someone alive indefinitely. These essences are tricky, of course, because they change over time. Bodies are the real problem.”

“You’re talking about old people treatment.”

“Well, yes, but no. I’m talking about understanding that thing, that essence, that is us.”

“Our souls?”

“Our minds and bodies. Our personhood.”

Simone’s mother had said her father fancied himself a philosopher. She remembered him always talking about these abstract concepts and remembered having no idea what he’d been talking about. Now she understood, a little. She wasn’t bothered by the fact a copy of herself existed in Cyberspace because it was an incomplete copy—no matter what it thought. She wasn’t bothered that the implications annoyed some people (like her father). What irked her was the fact its existence meant the Consortium wouldn’t let her go to a Rejuv Facility to activate her genetic package—the latest one uploaded about six months ago—and rehusk a body. She also didn’t know much about what this meant but she did know that the few people with enough money to do this (like her brother, Rigon) always lost some time. She would lose six months of her life. All the memories that had happened to her since they’d scanned her last would be gone. All of them.

“You do all this, Dad, so that people can know who they are?”

“I do this because it’s necessary for our survival. We’re smart, but fragile. There are other smart things out there that aren’t so fragile. We must improve ourselves, or perish.”

“Mom says stuff like that.”

“She’s a smart woman.”

“And a pain.”

“What if I told you that I believe every Alter has the potential to summon an entity? What if I told you I believe that you can think of each Alter’s entity as a prize. We once believed every human being was given a guardian angel. What if the entities are like those, but only we Alters get them? Now imagine a world where we have an army of Alters with entities. The Rogues and their slaves could be beaten back, destroyed even. Realspace would be cleansed, and Cyberspace would be a safe place for us to use—not a place where the innocent are turned.”

“But what about Alter Ghosts, like us?”

He smiled. “That’s a whole other conversation.”

They heard a car crunching up the gravel drive. They moved to the edge of the field and saw twin cones of headlights punching through the darkness into front of the house. They heard the car doors open, heard men muttering, and saw Joss Beckwith walk toward the house.

“He looks fine,” Simone said.

“No handcuffs. I bet they promised him the world.”

“I can’t believe him!”

“Shh,” he said. “It’s windy out here, but noise travels.”

“He knows what those Rogues did to him.”

“I bet they lied to distract him from the fact Rogues do that to human beings. He got off easy, by the way. Your mother has made a career of tracking down people deformed by the Rogues, but I’ve seen my fair share. I once saw a man who woke up with eyes in his chest.”