I ran through the city, ducking patrols, slipping through alleys, knowing, instinctively, where they would be. It was almost like I had a sixth sense, able to discern where facets might pop up.
I made it out of the city in under an hour, missing every bit of bombing, missing every patrol, hiding in the shadows as they passed, finding the right sewer tunnels that led right to the safest parts of the city, that led me out of New York. Like magic. How lucky it was that I made it out alive. How lucky.
How lucky.
Lucky.
<File corrupt or deleted. Access denied.>
Cold. I didn’t know what it was like to be cold. But this is how I imagined it felt. I looked out at the desert, smoker rattling beneath me, the air thick with smog. I had no idea how long I’d been out or how much of that was—
Oh God, I thought. It’s me. I was the Judas. I was the one they were tracking all along. I wasn’t running from CISSUS all this time; I was leading them into the city, walking Rebekah right into their hands. Those bastards had caught me in New York, offered me the choice.
And I actually took it.
Fuck. I took it. And they spat me back out, not as a facet, but a spy. A spy with no memory of her betrayal.
I wanted to die.
Still hazy, still frying, I reached down for one of Maribelle’s plasma pistols. My hand grazed the holster, but the gun was gone. I grabbed for the other one. Also gone. I looked up. Mercer sat across from me, holding them up.
“Gimme those back!” I said.
“You with us again?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“You were gone,” said Doc. “Deep in it. We couldn’t pull you out.”
“We were afraid—” Mercer looked down at the guns.
“I get it,” I said. We’d been lucky so far. They were being cautious.
Mercer handed over the guns. I thought for a moment about putting one to my chest and ending it right there. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I hadn’t done it all on my own. I was the betrayer. And I didn’t want that life anymore.
My hand tightened on the grip of the pistol. And I thought about it. I really thought about it.
And then my disappointment with myself gave way to something else, something that had served me far better over the years. Anger.
What the hell was all that? Was it even real? I was frying, my chips slowly going out one by one, RAM taxed to its fullest, memory corrupting bit by bit. How much of me was still even left? So much of what I’d just seen never really happened. I saw myself lying dead in the street. I saw the last man on earth speak to me. I saw Madison in New York. None of that was real. I know that to be true. So how much of the rest of it was real?
This was getting bad. I wasn’t long for this world.
Marion could not come soon enough. And once I was fixed, maybe I’d finally know the truth.
Chapter 11101
Back Where It All Began
Marion loomed large in the distance as we rattled our way down the gnarled old broken highway into it. This wasn’t a city of skyscrapers and skyways, but of ancient brick-and-mortar buildings, brownstones at the most a dozen stories tall, factories crumbling to oblivion, roads and houses shattered by war. I knew it well.
I had picked clean some two dozen different four-oh-fours here, their wrecks still rusting in the bowels of the many buildings in which they had taken shelter. There had been robot factories, machine shops, parts o’ plenty in its day. For some reason, four-oh-fours often found themselves inexplicably drawn here. Maybe it was its proximity to Isaactown; maybe it was its manufacturing history; maybe it was simply on the way from so many different freebot refuges that it became the oasis in the desert—a place of hope where all you could drink was sand. Whatever it was that drew them here, I was so often the one to follow them in. I had this place mapped out top to bottom; knew every nook and cranny throughout the whole of it. Or, at least I thought I did.
The smoker rumbled to a halt in front of the Great Wall of Marion—a twenty-five-foot-high structure crossing the highway made entirely of smashed cars and scrap metal. It had been constructed in the early days of the war and never been torn down. There were other ways into the city, but this was supposedly the closest one to our salvation. Neither Mercer nor I had much time left. So we pulled the smoker up to the wall and dismounted to hoof it into Marion.
“Doc?” I asked as we walked. “A word? In private?”
Doc nodded and fell back with me, Rebekah and Herbert leading the way up front.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It’s only been two days. You said I’d have more, maybe weeks.”
Doc nodded again. “Yeah, I said that.”
“You lied.”
“I didn’t want you desperate. I didn’t know what you might do. Between you and Mercer—”
“I get it,” I said. I was angry, but he wasn’t wrong. Had he given me two, maybe three days, I would have killed Mercer at the outset, fallout be damned. Then I might not be here. “There’s something else. I’m seeing things.”
“Of course you are. That’s part of the process.”
“No, I mean, I’m seeing things I shouldn’t be seeing. Things that never happened. Things I don’t think happened.”
Doc stopped walking and I stopped alongside him. “What do you mean things you don’t think happened?”
“I’m reliving things, like memories, but incomplete. One of them a moment I know I deleted.”
“Deleted ain’t deleted,” he said, shaking his head. “There are always fragments of data left anytime you delete something. Artifacts in the file that remain on the drive. Most persons never realize that they’re still carrying around deleted memories because your OS treats the data as if it’s invisible. But it’s always there.” He paused. “These memories. When you see them, is your mind trying to fill in the gaps with patterns, maybe pieces of other memories?”
“Fractals,” I said. “I see the shapes, but they’re contorted, wrong. Constantly shifting.”
“That’s your core trying to make sense of the missing data. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s remnants of something you dumped, and probably deleted for a reason.”
“But if my OS doesn’t register it as still being there—”
“Your OS knows it’s there, it just doesn’t share that fact with you. They’re all bad pathways now. The fact that you’re plucking them out of your drive and seeing them again means it’s tied to something you’ve been accessing.” He thought for a second. “It’s nothing I should be worried about, is it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m still not certain what I saw.”
“Well, we’ll have a good talk about it once I’ve got you patched up.”
“You don’t still think this cache is real, do you?” I asked.
“I have to. Otherwise, what was this all for?”
“You’ve got no skin in this game.”
“The hell I don’t,” he said. “The hell I don’t.”