The Eternal Prison

 

 

IN THE HEAT, FOREVER WAS A LOT SHORTER THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE.

Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped My Russian’s blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me,
How many men have you killed, for
yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didn’t know. I’d lost count. I was dead. I’d died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky, all of it in strange, muffled silence as my ears rang.

 

Well, shit,
I thought, sitting up on my elbows.
That’s fucking strange.

 

 

 

 

By JEFF SOMERS

The Electric Church

The Digital Plague

The Eternal Prison

 

 

 

 

Copyright

Copyright Š 2009 by Jeff Somers

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S.

Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Orbit

Hachette Book Group

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First eBook Edition: August 2009

Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-31605292-4

 

 

Contents

 

COPYRIGHT

 

 

IN THE HEAT, FOREVER WAS A LOT SHORTER THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE.

 

BY JEFF SOMERS

 

 

PART ONE

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

I: AMERICAN MURDER

 

II: JUST STILL ALIVE

 

III: I WASN’T SURE I WANTED TO RESIST

 

IV: EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST CROWD

 

V: HARD PEOPLE DOING A HARD JOB

 

VI: A HEAVY BOLT OF FABRIC STRETCHED ALL AROUND US, SUFFOCATING

 

VII: YOUR ONLY CHANCE OF SURVIVING ME

 

VIII: THIS WAS ENTERTAINMENT

 

IX: IF YOU WANTED TO KILL ME… THERE ARE FASTER WAYS

 

X: THE LITTLE MAN AND HIS FREAKS

 

XI: IT’S ALL RIGHT. YOU DID LOOK KIND OF SAD ABOUT IT

 

XII: SOME MIRACLE OF SHITHEAD PHYSICS

 

XIII: A LITTLE GOD

 

XIV: ROLLING ALONG TO SOME INEVITABLE DISASTER

 

XV: A MARKO ORIGINAL

 

XVI: WONDER WHAT HE USES NEEDLES FOR

 

XVII: FLAMES WHERE THEIR EYES SHOULD HAVE BEEN

 

XVIII: I’D BEEN DIGESTED A LITTLE

 

XIX: I DON’T HAVE A SCREEN TO REPRESENT PAINFUL DEATH

 

 

PART TWO

 

 

 

XX: CRAZY WAS GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT

 

XXI: DESPERATE FOLKS, I FIGURED

 

XXII: EVEN THE HUMAN ONES

 

XXIII: YOU’RE GONNA NEED THE HAND

 

XXIV: FLOAT BACK TO SAFETY ON MY BLOATED, BUOYANT CORPSE

 

 

PART THREE

 

 

 

XXV: SURVIVES THROUGH MYSTERIOUS MEANS

 

XXVI: A FUCKING PERSON OF IMMENSE INTEREST

 

XXVII: STILL STANDING IN DEFIANCE OF THE KNOWN LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

 

XXVIII: I THINK OF HIM AS LITTLE DICK

 

XXIX: AN ESTIMATED LIFE SPAN OF UNTIL THE UNIVERSE CONTRACTED INTO A HEAVY DOT

 

XXX: I WAS FOURTEEN AGAIN

 

XXXI: THEY ALWAYS CAME BACK

 

 

PART FOUR

 

 

 

XXXII: STARTING TO BLACKEN ON THE EDGES

 

XXXIII: AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT UNTIL A FEW MOMENTS AGO

 

XXXIV: THE BEST IDEA I’D HAD IN YEARS

 

XXXV: NONE OF THAT PRETENDER BULLSHIT

 

XXXVI: I WANT TO BE ERASED

 

XXXVII: AND THOSE WERE MY ADVANTAGES

 

XXXVIII: TWO, I’D BEEN FUCKING LUCKY

 

XXXIX: ALL ITS LIFE, ONLY WAITING FOR ME TO ARRIVE

 

XL: I’LL PROBABLY HAVE YOU CRUSHED INTO A CUBE AND CARRY YOU AROUND AS A SOUVENIR

 

XLI: REACTING TO THE POWERFUL RADIATION OF THEIR THOUGHTS

 

XLII: BECAUSE YOU’RE A MISERABLE BASTARD

 

XLIII: IMAGINING THAT I ALWAYS GOT TO DECIDE WHO I KILLED WAS JUST ARROGANCE

 

EPILOGUE

 

 

APPENDIX

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

MEET THE AUTHOR

 

THE TERMINAL STATE

 

 

 

 

To my Danette, whose wrath I fear, whose support I require, and whose affection I treasure

 

 

 

 

PART ONE

 

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

SHORT WORK OF A FILTHY JOB

 

 

 

 

“Stay down,” the tall System Pig with the precise, fussy beard said in a reasonable tone of voice. Gentle pressure on my shoulders guided me to my knees, my wrists bound behind me. “Or I will cut a few tendons and hobble you,
capisci?
”

 

His partner was shorter and older, standing in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lower lip. His face was red and blistery, like he’d fallen asleep in an oven, and he hadn’t said a fucking word since I’d been dragged out here. After a moment he scanned us quickly, nodded once to himself, and stepped around to join his partner behind us.

 

I was soaked and shivering, the steady rain drumming down onto my shoulders and finding its secret ways inside. The street outside the remnants of Pickering’s bar was half-flooded, inches of water in spreading pools. I was one of four assholes kneeling in the damp; I wouldn’t have suspected four people remained anywhere below Twenty-third Street these days. Not alive, anyway.

 

The two System Pigs who’d scooped me up with their list of Very Important People had moved on down the block, taking their team of Stormers into a sagging old tenement. Every few minutes there was a gunshot or a shout, but otherwise it was peaceful, kneeling in the water, feeling the cold rain make its way down my back, my hands bound and no more decisions to be made. I’d been ready for my execution, but I was just as happy to kneel here and think about nothing.

 

I hadn’t been myself for a long time. The Plague had sucked everything out of me.

 

The guy next to me started murmuring something; it took me a moment to recognize it as praying, old ritual language. I remembered my mom praying when I’d been a kid, her singsong voice, her tightly shut eyes. I opened my eyes and looked at my fellow Very Important People: none of them looked so important to me. They were wet, thin, and all three sported the ugly scars on their necks left by the Plague; a few months before, they’d been coughing blood and croaking, inches from death. And I’d saved them. These three assholes. I’d scratched myself bloody crawling around the fucking world, and it was because of me they were still here, still breathing.

 

I looked around dreamily, this block I used to know so well. The System Security Force had already torn down half the buildings, flattening everything into rubble and then sending in Droids to crush everything into neat little cubes. I had no doubt more Droids would eventually roll in to collect the cubes, picking the whole place clean until you’d never guess that any of this, any of us, had ever been here.

 

The thought slipped off the shiny, smooth surface of my brain and disappeared.

 

A block or two over, a huge Vid screen glowed silently, bright and frantic, beaming the mime-news to everyone within a few hundred yards. The clips were short and edited to convey most of the message without audio. Most of the stories were upbeat testimonials to how the System was recovering from the Plague, but I’d been tuning into the underground Vid nets out of the Appalachians for the last few weeks, and I silently translated as the clips flashed by.

 

First, fifteen seconds on how casualty numbers from the disease were still going down as more and more surprisingly tough and scrappy citizens emerged from hiding places, shaken but alive. Translation: the entire East Coast of North America was a fucking graveyard, and places as distant as Brazil had seen upward of 10 percent of their population killed. Two more days and the whole fucking world would have been dead, jiving and singing, doing dance moves.

 

Then, a happy story about the citizens of the System of Federated Nations African Department discovering they had a food surplus and electing voluntarily to send huge shipments of organics and nutrition tabs to other areas of the System more affected by the Plague. This with lots of clips of smiling, celebrating people, people just fucking delighted to be living in the System. Translation: everyone, everywhere was starving
before
the fucking Plague, and the way things were going n-tabs were going to be the new goddamn currency any day now. And if you didn’t have any n-tabs, you could cut off a finger and pay—feed—someone with that, and we’d all be eating each other, over and over again, the System gnawing itself raw.

 

The rotten tenement down the street suddenly exploded, a plume of fire and masonry shooting out into the street below, the world shuddering and leaping. The skinny guy kneeling next to me cursed under his breath. I turned to watch the smoke and fluttering debris for a moment. It was beautiful.

 

“They’re okay, Silvie,” Fussy Beard behind me said, getting his report in his earbud. “The rats are holed up in a secret room, packed in like fucking roaches, and blew a charge when Solly came sniffing around, but they tripped it too soon and killed two of
themselves,
and we didn’t even get a scratch.” The two cops laughed. I smiled, too. This was fine. Everything was fine.

 

The Vid was now showing Dick Marin, the Emperor himself. Director of Internal Affairs of the System Security Force; no one was telling Dick what to do these days. Dick was discussing the need for a reorganization in the wake of the Plague, in order to make things more efficient. Translation: his nominal bosses the Joint Council Undersecretaries, who thought