Erik climbed down from the pilot’s station, pausing on the ladder. “We’re fifteen minutes from docking, Phae.”
She nodded and turned to me. “We good? Should be in range of a smart node by now.”
I checked my smart, finding a new ID had been uploaded: Hubert Plympton, Special Agent, UN Federal Security - Criminal Investigation Division. Hubert? Fucking Mr Mac. “Yeah, we’re good.”
Renewal’s Medical Director was named Dr Julieta Perales, a handsome and elegant woman who probably spent just as much on rejuve as Theodore, the retired actor. She was also a lot less pleasant to deal with. “I really can’t see how we can help you, Agent Plympton,” she told me, apparently relaxed and unruffled behind her desk. “Naturally, when we heard the news and realised one of our former patients was responsible we conducted a thorough review of his time here. However, I can assure you there were absolutely no indications anything like this would occur. Our ethical code would have dictated that any warning signs be notified to the relevant authorities.” She gave a tight, professional smile. “There really isn’t much else to tell you, and I’m sure you’re familiar with the statutes regarding disclosure of medical records, even after death.”
“Exemptions apply in cases of Global Security,” I told her. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”
She maintained her smile, giving a smooth and evidently rehearsed reply, “I’m aware of the exemptions and if you can show me a warrant from the Security Council…”
“Over half your patients are aquatic hab residents,” Phaedra said. “Referred as per your contract with the community justice system. Right?”
Perales’ smile flickered, just a little. “Quite right.”
“The justice minister is very fond of me. Kind’ve a surrogate daughter thing. I’d hate to have to call him.”
I saw the doctor’s face darken as pragmatism warred with innate medical bureaucracy. I decided Phaedra had poked her a little too hard and said, “We don’t need full access, in any case. I’m more interested in the treatment Schiffler received here, specifically the immersion element.”
“I assure you our immersion therapy meets the highest industry standards and is subject to regular independent review.”
I gave her a smile of my own. “Then let’s just call this a surprise inspection, shall we?”
“There wasn’t anything unusual in Mr Schiffler’s treatment profile,” Perales told us a short while later. We stood around an immersion couch in one of the clinic’s treatment rooms as she called up various holo-stills from Schiffler’s sessions. “Relaxation scenarios alternated with situations that forced him to confront the damage his behaviour inflicted on himself and those around him.” She tapped a finger to the hypodermic armature fixed to the side of the couch. “The procedure is pharmalogically assisted to enhance the realism.”
“So they’re high as a kite when they’re in there?” Phaedra asked.
“Mild hallucinogens only, no opioids or stimulants.”
Phaedra squinted at a still of several naked female bodies in mid-cavort. “That looks pretty stimulating.”
“We find a reward-based structure to be the most effective. A carrot-and-stick approach, if you will.”
“Put him through something shitty and then ease the pain with porn.” Phaedra shrugged. “I can see that.”
I watched the stills roll: A young man behind a dumpster bleeding out from a stomach wound. A hot-tub blow-job from a model just dissimilar enough from a famous actress to avoid a lawsuit. A middle-aged woman screaming in maternal anguish as tears streaked down her face. A mountain-top looking out over a sunlit valley that resembled something from an old fantasy flick. I was about to let it slide by when I noticed a structure in the foreground; white marble pillars arranged in a circle.
“Stop it there,” I said. “That doesn’t seem to fit with everything else.”
“Ah, yes,” Perales said. “A recent addition, but an effective one. It’s called the Temple of Serenity. The specifics of the design vary according to the subject, but it’s intended to enable the patient to connect with their spiritual side, provided they have one, of course. In this case, Schiffler being vaguely paganistic in his beliefs, a Greco-Roman style was deemed the best choice.”
“How exactly do you connect someone with their spirituality?”
“Well.” Perales crossed her arms, getting defensive. “You don’t. Not really. But there are particular centres of the brain that respond to certain stimuli and convey the… impression of what Bhuddists like to call ‘enlightenment’.”
“You mean, you dope them up and trick them into thinking they’ve seen the face of god in an immersion sim?”
“The path to recovery is never a straight one, Agent Plympton. And the subject invariably realises on waking that the experience was a simulated one. However, the sensation of a spiritual awakening persists in the memory. An awareness of the wider universe is important when combating addiction.”
I studied the image a moment longer. It seemed a slender lead, but it was the only indication of a connection to cult-like behaviour. “Fire it up, Doctor,” I told Perales, taking off my jacket and climbing onto the couch. “Just the serene temple thing, and hold the drugs.”
I’ve never been a fan of Immersion. It was too expensive pre-war and all that time spent with Consuela’s increasingly embittered consciousness had soured me on the whole thing. But I’d never doubted the power of it, the insertion of a new reality into the brain with sufficient accuracy that you just don’t question it. Compelling for some, addictive for others, and I’d recently come to terms with the fact that I had an addictive nature. So I did my best not to enjoy the feel of a sun-warmed breeze on my skin, or drink in the fresh mountain air as I marvelled at the impossibly beautiful valley below. Don’t forget, it’s all a lie.
I walked across a field of long, green grass towards the temple, marble pillars shining white in the late afternoon sun, the breeze blowing autumnal leaves from a nearby copse of maple across my path. The temple itself held no secrets that I could see, just a circle of paving stones surrounded by seven pillars. I dimly recalled seven pillars having some kind of religious significance but couldn’t place it. Otherwise, I found nothing. No vaguely worded inscriptions inviting a close examination of the soul, no mysterious symbols in need of interpretation. Just the pillars and the view.
Maybe it’s supposed to teach the virtues of patience, I wondered as the minutes ticked by and nothing happened. The sun’s rays shimmered like multiple searchlights through the drifting clouds, painting the valley below an enchanting range of colours, and nothing happened. You really need to be stoned to appreciate this. I opened my mouth to speak the end-sim codeword Perales had given me, then hesitated as I noticed the clouds had stopped drifting. In fact, it had all stopped. The maple leaves were frozen in the air, the swaying grass now stiffened like spikes. But the air, the air was definitely getting colder.
Something flashed in the sky, bright enough to make me turn away, tears streaming from my eyes. When I looked again the clouds were gone and the sky had turned black but for a small pinprick of light. It started to pulse as I watched, flaring then diminishing in a regular rhythm that I realised matched the beat of my heart. It grew bigger with every pulse, the light varying in colour from white to red, to blue, then green. The effect was mesmerising, even without the drugs.
The pulsing abruptly stopped, the light now a single transcendent star commanding every facet of my attention. I heard the voice then, female, un-inflected but somehow utterly compelling. “From light…” The light began to swell, shimmering as it did so. “…we are born.” The light burst apart, birthing a massive spider’s web of glowing gas that surrounded me on all sides. “To light we return,” the voice continued as the gaseous web began to coalesce. My physics was pretty limited but I’d seen enough pop-science docs to know this was a representation of the birth of the universe, a single massive release of energy coalescing into physical rea
lity under the pressure of gravity. Stars began to ignite a second later, thousands, millions, every colour and shade. The effect was impressive, even emotional, and I could only imagine what it felt like for a long-term junkie stoned on hallucinogens.
“From light we are born to light we return,” the voice repeated, once, then twice, then again and again, the words overlapping until it became a discordant babbling mantra, maddeningly inescapable.
Then silence.
After the babbling silence was a shock, leaving me stunned as I floated in my new born universe.
“Your light, Randall,” the voice said, returned to its previous emotionless but compelling cadence. The stars began to shift around me, slowly at first, then clumping together with increasing rapidity, the sky becoming black as it formed a single shimmering image in the void. A woman’s face. A woman in her fifties with a very sad smile: Lisabet Holstom. “Your light resides in her, Randall,” the voice told me, its previously empty tone now stern and commanding, a high priest sending a supplicant on a holy mission. “Set it free. Set all of them free…”
Holstrom’s face began to glow brighter as the voice spoke on, strident and booming now: “FROM LIGHT WE ARE BORN TO LIGHT WE RETURN!”
I tried to close my eyes against the now blinding glare of Holstrom’s image but found I couldn’t. The sim had evidently been coded to prevent Randall averting his gaze at this moment. Holstrom’s face began to flicker, a thrumming migraine inducing pulse that seemed to pry its way into my brain as the voice boomed on and on.
“FROM LIGHT WE ARE BORN….”
“Bolero!” I shouted out the end-sim code word. “Bolero! Get me the fuck out of here!”
I surfaced with a hammering heart and what felt like a pick-axe buried in my skull. The tremble in my limbs was so severe it took a few seconds for me to drag myself into a sitting position.
“I didn’t know!” Perales was backed up against the wall with Phaedra’s gun pressed into her cheek, hands raised and all composure vanished. “I swear!”
“Your vitals went haywire,” Phaedra told me, keeping her eyes locked on Perales. “Near fatal levels. Looked like this bitch was trying to kill you.”
I looked down at my hands, making fists until the tremble faded enough that I felt capable of standing. “The temple,” I said, advancing towards Perales. “Did you come up with it yourself?”
“No.” She shook her head, as much as she could under the pressure of Phaedra’s weapon. “Most of our sims are third-party software.”
“So where’d you get this one?”
“I need to check the records.”
I nodded to Phaedra and she stepped back, allowing Perales to pull a smart from the pocket of her lab-coat. “We have a long-standing contract with Sensory Realities,” she said, calling up the relevant company site. “They’re mainly involved in the games sector but they also have a therapeutic arm.”
I punched the details into my own smart. More grist for Janet’s mill.
“That sim turned one of your patients into a mass murderer,” I told Perales. “And you didn’t notice.”
“Our monitoring protocols are strict,” she insisted. “But non-invasive. We only intervene when the patient’s vitals start to spike. Which is extremely rare, and never happened in Schiffler’s case.”
“Must’ve been an incremental thing,” I muttered, turning back to the couch. “Increased the conditioning with every session. What I saw was the final iteration, by the time he experienced it, Schiffler would’ve been so steeped in the creed of his fake enlightenment it was probably just another holy vision.”
My eyes went to the couch’s hypo-armature. “Are hallucinogens used in corrective immersion?” I asked Perales.
“Well, yes,” she said. “Bringing about a personality change requires at least some form of pharmacology.”
Corvin and Blair. Both recipients of extensive immersion. With Vargold’s links to the justice system, how difficult could it have been to add a little something extra to the mix? Corvin gets spliced into a werewolf and Blair a human bomb. No such extremes had been needed for Schiffler, I suspected because Vargold’s reach didn’t extend to this clinic, just the software they used.
“Thank you for your time, Doctor,” I said, pulling on my jacket. “We’ll be going now. It’s in your best interests to forget about our visit.”
Chapter 20
“The therapeutic arm of Sensory Realities is run as a non-profit,” Janet said, her holo-rendered face pale and indistinct in the bright St Barthélemy sun. We’d found a cafe near the beach to make the call, Phaedra sipping a mint-julep whilst I worked my way through a whole pitcher of iced-tea and tried to ignore the soul-sucking blue emptiness above. “Guess who their principal donor is?”
“Astravista?”
“Actually, the money comes from a charitable trust registered in New York which receives donations from several different sources. But dig down a few layers and you find Astravista as the main donor. The interesting thing is the principal trustee, Konstantin Wallace. He’s ninety-six years old and has an academic career going back six decades, social sciences, anthropology and bio-chemistry. Clearly a bit of a polymath. Numerous published papers and a few books, burgeoning media career in his forties, turned up on some docs and talk shows, appointed to the UN Scientific Advisory Committee for a while, then fell off the radar shortly after the Rapture Wars. Ten years later he resurfaced in Korea.”
“Haunai Genetics,” I said.
“That’s right. Kruger finally got us access to an unedited historical data-set. Wallace’s listed as a non-executive director, but the financial records make it clear he was the principal investor. Since the company was wound up the senior officers seem to have had a remarkably unlucky time of it. Two died in a freak road accident and a third went missing on a hiking trip in Nepal. Wallace’s the only Board Member still around.”
“He still in Korea?”
Janet shook her head with a grin. “It looks like you get to return to your roots, Wallace is in Scotland. He bought himself a private island in the Hebrides a few years ago. I’m sending through some schematics. He hasn’t skimped on security so I’m not sure how you’ll get in there, assuming that’s what you want to do.”
“Vargold?” I asked.
“Still digging. He’s been on the feeds again, though. The Jason Alpha is only a week away from its maiden voyage.”
Jason Alpha, his grand design. It had to be linked to all this. Had Rybak and the others posed a threat to it somehow?
“Keep at it,” I said and closed the call.
“Pretty lady,” Phaedra observed, cheeks contracting as she sucked julep through a straw. “You’re a lucky fella.”
“I’m aware.” I rubbed my temples and risked a glance at the sky, managing a good three seconds before my eyes shut tight as the dizziness swept through me. “Don’t suppose Erik’s sub is capable of a transatlantic crossing?”
The sub sat in the quietest corner of the docks that formed Salacia’s base, resembling a giant torpedo with a bad skin condition. A hundred metre long round-nosed tube, its hull covered from end to end with small triangular crenellations of irregular size. “She used to be the USS Olympia,” Erik said. “One of the last attack subs built for the US Navy. Fusion core reactor and hybrid hydro-jet screw drive. She was sitting in mothballs in the San Diego yards until Aquatic League Security let me buy her a few years ago, secret weapon kinda thing. Just in case. We named her the Tethys.”
“What’s that’s stuff on her hull?” I asked.
“Sonic baffles. Like the inside of a recording studio, only bigger. Confuses sonar. They’re retractable so overall speed isn’t affected. Should get you to the Scottish coast in just under four days.”
“Weapons?”
“Thirty Fire-lance torps. Faster and more sophisticated than anything else in the water these days. We make them ourselves so, y’know, military secret and all. I’ll kill you if you tell anyone.” He gave an
apologetic shrug. “Sorry.”
I watched Phaedra carrying her gear onto the sub. “Guess she had to pull a lot of strings to make this happen.”
“Not really. Everyone’s mighty pissed about what Schiffler did. More so now it turns out he wasn’t some random nut. The rest of the world needs to know they can’t fuck around on our turf. Most folks choose to live down here to get away from all that shit.”
In addition to Phaedra and Erik, Aquatic League Security had seen fit to send along what I assumed to be their version of a special ops squad. There were six of them, all products of the defunct Aqua-Utopian Movement judging by their mods. They stowed their gear and started prepping the sub with happy efficiency, displaying the kind of keenness that came from long-term training and zero combat experience.
“They’ve been waiting for something like this their whole lives,” Phaedra explained. “The Movement envisioned a war between land and sea once the inevitable apocalypse kicked in.”
I spent much of the journey studying the schematics of Wallace’s island hideaway and going over the background material Janet had uploaded to my smart. Much of it consisted of Wallace’s scientific papers and copies of his books. The science stuff was mostly lost on me, but the books made for more interesting reading. The first, entitled, ‘Towards Ascension’, was an optimistic treatise on humanity’s prospects in the post-fusion age. For millennia we have struggled to free ourselves of the mud from which we grew, Wallace wrote in the introduction. Our struggle has been a painful one, our path ever obstructed by superstition, prejudice, dogma and the thousand other frailties to which our species is prone. But now, through the wondrous agency and insight gifted to us by the extraordinary accident of our evolution, an infinity of possibility awaits us, in the stars.