Chapter #22An Excavation of the Past, Part 1 by: Seuzz   You wheel in mid-stride and stalk back around the lodge to the van. Plante is behind the wheel, about to start it up. He rolls down the window as you approach, looking wary.
"How does this thing work," you ask. "I mean, I understand you putting people on that bed, and it looks like you drill down into them—"
"The PDT removes the P3," Plante says.
"The soul, right?" Plante makes a face, and even you wince, both your real mind and your emulated one rebelling at a word that doesn't belong there. "But what do you do with it? After you take it out of someone?"
"I showed you, it's in that carry-on bag in the back."
"Right. Show it to me. The P3, not the bag."
Plante looks exasperated and harried as he crawls out and takes you into the back of the van again. From the bag he pulls a disc the size of a dinner plate but several inches thick. It looks made of solid gold, and it's very heavy in your hands. In ruby-red letters, the name "Giuseppe Bracchioforte" floats above it. The wispy thought My old name drifts through your head, and dissolves. "What are you going to do with it?" you ask.
"Take it back to London and put it in secure storage."
"How long will it keep? I mean, will it fade or melt or—"
"It will keep indefinitely. Well, we think so. They seem to be stable in this state, we haven't been able to run long-term tests, but—"
"How long do they stay stable, that you're sure of?"
"Months, at least. Why?" His eyes narrow.
"Could you take my P3 back out of this carcass and put Cox's into it?" You point to your head.
"Of course, but you already signed away the rights to your original husk."
"I know that. But could you keep me like this—" You tap the disc, then hand it back to Plante. "—until you got me into another one?"
"For how long?"
"A couple of days, maybe a week."
"Oh, that wouldn't be a problem," he says. "Uh, is that what you want to do?" You nod, and he sighs. "Then I'll get started again."
Clemons and Howland look up in surprise when you trudge back out of the break room again. "I thought you'd—"
"Change of plan," you say. "Cox, you're going to infiltrate as this guy, and I'll be taking another slot." You gesture Clemons over and draw him close for a low consultation. "This is a new technique. Basically, they suck you out of your old body and put you in a new one. Better than tats, because this way—"
You smash another window with your mind; Howland cusses.
"—we can do what these biffs can do."
"So I gathered," Clemons says in a husky voice.
"Right. So, we're going out back, and Plante is going to put you in here." You tap your chest. "I'm going into storage, but you're going to drive me out to where you can put me in another one. This guy has a brother, named Joe, out in Virginia, and that's where I want you to put me."
"A brother? This stuff runs in families?"
"No. Shut up. You'll see when you get in. You'll have to do a little tap dance when you see Joe, because I— Or you—" You sigh. Damn pronouns. "Because Frank, that's this guy, is on a job for the Stellae, and you'll have to cut it short. Tell Joe— Oh, fuck, tell him whatever halfway convincing thing you can come up with in order to get him into Plante's machine. Tell 'im you lost the trail. I dunno"
"I lost the trail?" Clemons asks faintly.
"You'll understand. You'll see the problem when you get in here. It's not much different from using tats." You smash a fourth window. "You just get to break more stuff."
* * * * *
Plante is ready for you back in the van. "I'm not gonna go crazy, being out of my body and everything, am I?" you ask, and pause now that the thought has hit you. You were once locked in a box for most of a day last year when a job when sour, and you almost lost your wits from claustrophobia and sensory deprivation.
"The experience of temporal passage is product of sensory stimulation," says Plante. You frown sourly at him. "No, it will feel instantaneous," he says, shrinking a little under your glare.
"Good." You drop onto the gurney with a grunt and settle in with several deep breaths. Plante bustles behind you, and you stare up at the crystalline drill bit. It gleams, then with a whir it lowers. You close your eyes.
* * * * *
You feel yourself standing on a flat surface, and can only dimly make out vague, shadowy shapes. An ardent curiosity to explore fills you.
Before you can move, though, the landscape leaps into visibility, glowing under a light from behind. Your shadow streams out before you.
Rocks, meadows, hills and mountains appear before you, and your eye leaps from one to the next, and overleaps each to a point beyond. Even where peaks rise, you find you can look past them, as though they are features draw on a map, not mounds of earth obscuring the vistas beyond. Beyond mountains you glimpse plains with running rivers; savannahs over which thunder herds of strange and exotic beasts; jungles teaming with jeweled insects and iridescent birds; immense forests of shafting sunlight and enveloping solitudes. Farther and farther your eye leaps, until it reaches the end of land, a fringe of sand surf, and then your gaze is raking the sea. An immense ocean, vaster even than the continent that spreads before you, and lost in its waves and currents and hurricanes are islands and smoking volcanoes, poking from an ocean that covers coral reefs and sunken lands. And beyond it is more land, distant continents cleft with gorges and canyons and plains. Mountains as sharp and cold as broken china trail toward a polar ice cap. And beyond it lie yet more continents and yet more seas.
And everywhere are tribal huts and broken ruins; caravans of merchants carrying exotic wares and news from distant empires; nestling villages and stone cities, with their own churches, guild halls, castles and universities.
Spasms run up and down your legs, and you yearn to fly over and into all the lands and all the seas and all the cities, to explore and pry and inquire into every public thing and every long-lost secret. To dig up treasures, read old manuscripts, gaze through mighty telescopes.
You turn and look behind you. The vast orb of the sun overtops the horizon, filling your eyes with light yet without blinding you. Across its face streaks a shooting star.
* * * * *
You open your eyes. The crystalline drill bit gleams above you. You close your eyes again, and smile.
* * * * *
Lisa giggles shyly. That's her name, isn't it? Lisa? Frank's right, sometimes you move too fast for your own good. If it turns out her name is "Linda" or "Lindsay" or "Chrysanthemime"— She kisses you, and her mouth tastes like honey. "Chastity." Her name probably isn't chastity, not the way she came harder after you than you did after her.
"Close your eyes," she says. "You make me feel funny when you look at me."
"What, are you so ticklish I can't even look at you?"
"I mean—" She blushes. "I feel self-conscious, and then I want to stop." She sighs. "And I don't want to stop."
Little Joe had been hanging back, sticking his head up furtively and guardedly, but now he stands up and salutes. You bite your lower lip and shift so he doesn't get caught between your leg and Lisa's. "You'll put someone's eye out with that thing if you don't keep it under control," Frank had yelled at you a few months ago, when he dropped out of the top bunk to find your morning wood tenting the sheets of the lower bunk.
"No peeking," Lisa says, so you screw your eyes shut. She kisses you, and the perfume of her skin is like milk.
Something creaks nearby. She must be moving her purse so she can get into a better position. You put your arms around her ass to help her settle better.
Something clinks. The noise bothers you, and it bothers you more when Lisa pulls back.
You sense, rather than feel, a swift motion and a soft pressure against your face.
* * * * *
It's the third hard, hot slap that finally rouses you from torpor. Your hand flies up, and you grab a wrist. You raise your head, and glare.
A skinny-faced dipshit with straw-like hair, a cheek full of zits, and a chin covered in wiry bristles is panting heavily in your face. "Thank God," he shouts. "Come on, Joe, we have to—"
"Who the fuck are you?" you roar, and tighten your grip on his arm. How fucked up is this? Close your eyes to kiss a girl, and the next thing you know—
"No time for that! There's this asshole outside—"
"There's an asshole in here!"
"Joe, I got you out of the mask so we could get out of here, I'll explain—"
You feel yourself losing it. Bad things happen when you lose your shit, because once it starts to go it's hard for you to stop it. "One more time, twig! Then I pull your arm out and beat you to death with it! Who are you?"
"Ow, shit! Joe! Okay, okay!" The twig looks gratifyingly terrified. "My name is Will Prescott. I can take you to the Libra Personae. But we have to get out of here!"
The Libra Personae. Masks. Your mission. Your chest turns into an industrial furnace with a jet engine powering the bellows. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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