Crysis Escalation

Schism





New York State, 2023

‘They call me Prophet. Remember me.’

The barrel of the M12 automatic felt cool against his head. He hadn’t had cause to fire it at CELL or Ceph recently. Pressure on the trigger. Heat. Almost too hot for there to be pain. There was the weirdest sensation of something moving behind his eyes, inside his head, but just for a moment. He remembered sinking to his knees. He was dead then, but his brain was still receiving information. Nobody ever talked about this because nobody ever came back. The ground tipped towards him but everything went black before he face-planted.

He remembered speaking to Hargreave. He remembered being interrogated some time later. No, that wasn’t him. He was dead. He remembered putting the bullet through his head. It was either that or he would have slowly turned into a Ceph, his body eaten by tumours and alien DNA, becoming an alien killing machine.

If he was dead then why was he running across the wasteland, a darkened New York behind him, the damaged skyline reaching up like so many broken fingers? His hands had been bloody before. He’d been little more than a boy, a junior officer, the first time he’d killed. It’d happened in Iraq. It’d happened very quickly and he’d done it over a distance of seventy feet. The first time up close and personal, the first time he’d felt warm blood on his hands, had been in Columbia. Now he had blood on his hands again, and this time he couldn’t feel the warmth through the nanosuit. The blood steamed a bit in the cold air. Information on its chemical makeup scrolled down his vision from the suit’s Heads-Up Display. He knew everything there was to know about this blood except whose it was and how they’d died. Though Prophet knew they must have died at his hands.

Bright light stabbed down onto the broken concrete and scrubby plants. One helicopter gunship and then another hove into view. Information on the model of the gunships, their capabilities and armaments, played down the HUD. He could heard the pilots’ conversations with their control. They were CELL military contractors playing at being soldiers and getting paid more than real troops for their troubles. They were searching for an escaped nanosuit. Someone called Alcatraz. Who the f*ck is Alcatraz? he wondered. Then he remembered the kid he’d pulled from the river. The wreckage of the USS Nautilus. The cold feel of the metal of the M12 against his head.

‘Shit. I’m dead,’ Laurence Barnes, who they called Prophet, said to himself, but he didn’t stop running. He activated the stealth mode and the lensing field bent light around him. To all intents and purposes he disappeared as the harsh blue light of one of the gunship’s searchlights swept across where he’d been.

He became a ghost.

‘Okay, I’m gone now.’

‘I think we both know that’s not going to happen.’

‘I have a life . . . a family.’

The CSIRA Black Body Council interrogator glanced at the file.

‘Not much of one, not from what you were saying.’

‘You think you know me now, Roger?’

Prophet froze the footage that the suit was showing him. He could see how it was going to play out. He was lying down in a sewer trying to mask his heat signature from the thermographics that the pilots in the CELL gunships overhead would be using.

He now knew who he’d killed. Roger, the interrogator. The guy that CSIRA or CELL or whoever had sent to debrief him in the wake of the clusterf*ck that had been his recent operation in New York.

He remembered the disease, the quarantine. He remembered CELL being called in as a military contractor to enforce martial law in the city. He remembered how they had hunted him. And he remembered the Ceph. The same aliens he’d first encountered in the Pacific on Lingshan. Cephalopod-like aliens clothed in hi-tech war machines far in advance of humanity’s best military efforts. He remembered the suit melding with their technology. It hadn’t been the last time.

He had been in control for some of it, or some mix of him and Alcatraz had been, but now the memories were fragmented. The events played like two pieces of film of the same events running just slightly out of synch with each other, one superimposed over the top of the other.

It was worse than that. It didn’t stop the further back he went. He remembered Lingshan, but somehow he was also doing SERE training at Brunswick in Maine. He remembered Columbia, but he was ditching school and hanging with his friends. He remembered Iraq and at the same time reading comics, riding his bike, breaking into some kind of Sea World-style attraction. He remembered basic training and he remembered his Mom instilling the fear of god into him. The problem was that the mother he remembered, now superimposed on the hell of basic training, was white. Mrs Barnes had most decidedly not been.

There had been other signs as well. The fear as he’d lain down in the black water of the sewer – where had that come from? And Prophet’s skull felt fit to burst. The pain was a burning white light behind his eyes. He was sure there was blood trickling out of his ears under the suit, but then corpses don’t bleed. Maybe it’s the suit growing into my head to fix the problem, he thought. The suit should have been able to tell him what was going on, what was causing the pain, but the medical outputs seemed conflicted.

Prophet knew that none of this mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the mission. The only thing that mattered was what he knew. What he’d been shown on Lingshan, in the ice. He knew it was far from over. When he’d put the gun against his head that had been because of the disease, he told himself, he’d had no choice. He tried to ignore how much the cool metal of the gun barrel had seemed like a chance to rest.

The pain made him scream. Blackness claimed him.

Olfactory sensor overload. Information scrolled down Prophet’s vision, describing the chemical process of rot. It was biotelemetry telling him that he was sat in a stinking alley full of garbage.

There was someone else in the alley with him. Even as disorientated as he was, Prophet was shocked that he’d somehow managed to go from a nanosuited god-of-war to being blindsided in an alley. The man was well built, hair shaved at the sides, flat on top, green eyes but otherwise surprisingly non-descript. He looked to be in his early twenties. The jeans and t-shirt, despite the chill in the air, did nothing to disguise the man’s military bearing. Prophet could make out the bottom of the winged skull tattoo. The skull had a diving regulator in its mouth and the words Swift, Silent, Deadly underneath it.

‘F*cking jarhead . . .’ Prophet managed.

‘Screw you, you army puke,’ the other man said, without a trace of feeling.

The empty bottle he had thrown exploded against the wall of the alley. Prophet found himself alone. He pushed himself to his feet with difficulty. He staggered a bit but he could feel himself recovering. Presumably this was the suit working out how to deal with his bizarre situation.

Prophet became more alert with every step he took. He looked out of the alleyway. The alleyway led onto a rain-soaked boardwalk. Beyond the boardwalk was a beach, and then a dark rough sea.

The suit’s nav-systems had been trying to tell him for a while but it took the boardwalk, all the neon and garish casino fronts, to drive it home: Atlantic City. As if things weren’t bad enough, Prophet thought, I’m in Jersey.

It must have been late because there were very few people on the boardwalk. Still feeling a little disoriented, he decided that he wanted to see the ocean. He engaged the stealth mode, the lensing field ghosting him, and he crossed the street.

Glancing behind him, footage from a Macronet feed in the window of a bar caught his eye. He linked to the net with a thought, searched for the footage and had it downloaded to the HUD. He saw CELL military contractors brutalising and executing victims of the Manhattan virus. It cut to footage of Hargreave-Rasch board members being escorted through crowds of reporters. The headline read: Hargreave-Rasch’s board members to face congressional hearing over Manhattan Crisis.

Prophet figured that mismanagement was what they called war crimes these days. He believed that the board members should be punished for what they had done, but he didn’t hold out much hope. The system was too corrupt, and Hargreave-Rasch’s PR were already spinning the New York events.

He reached the beach without drawing too much attention to his hulking form. Mission, have to get back on the mission. For the first time in a long time the mission was his. He wasn’t doing what other people were telling him. And for the first time in a long time, he knew the mission was right. It was a simple matter of survival.

He was almost thinking straight now. The pain in his head had been a constant since New York, but the nausea and the acid burn in his stomach was gone. He’d always enjoyed looking at the ocean but tonight it disquieted him. He didn’t like water anymore.

‘You’re back again, huh, mister?’

Prophet turned to find himself looking down at a young girl, maybe ten- to twelve-years-old, smiling at him. She was dirty, her clothes were ragged, and she had dark hair and green eyes.

What was going on? Where’d she come from?! Then Prophet realised that he was somewhere new.

He checked the GPS. Somewhere in Ventnor City. The information came scrolling down the HUD for the asking. A working class neighbourhood that gangs and drugs were slowly claiming, thanks to the Double Dip Recession. He couldn’t remember ever having been here before but the girl definitely seemed to recognise him.

He was stood in some trees out the back of a series of panel board houses that might have been nice places to live, once. The wooded area was scattered with old bottles, tins, needles and other drug paraphernalia. There was the remains of fire in a dip in the ground.

‘I’ve been reading my bible.’ The girl was talking again. ‘Momma was always said it was a good thing to do. A righteous thing. Before they took her away.’ The girl swallowed hard. She looked like she was about to start crying.

Prophet hadn’t had much interaction with kids. He’d been good with them when he had to be, when his friends started pairing off and starting families, maybe a little too strict but that was the military in him. They’d liked him, though, he knew cool stuff and could do cool things. But he had no idea how to handle this.

He remembered her. Alice, his little sister. His parents had had children way too late. He remembered being surprised that his dad hadn’t been shooting blanks at that age. He remembered how young Alice had been when Mom had been diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s. He’d wondered if she’d been suffering, undiagnosed, when she’d gotten pregnant in her forties. Maybe even earlier, when they’d had him.

The religious stuff had always been there. As an adult he’d become convinced that half of it was fear and half of it was his mother’s need to look down on and judge others. When the Alzheimer’s kicked in, well, then the real fun and games had started. He’d known it was the disease, but that didn’t matter much when you were just a kid, getting beaten on and screamed at about how you were going to hell. In comparison the Marines had seemed like a pleasant alternative.

No! That never happened! My name is Laurence Barnes, I grew up in San Diego. They call me Prophet! Prophet knew these to be false memories. They were someone else’s. Red warning signs were appearing on the HUD as the suit tried to understand what was going on in his head. He’d been in fire fights in over a dozen countries and here, in Jersey, confronted by a ten-year-old girl, who at some level he knew was his little sister even though he didn’t have one, he was having a panic attack.

‘Momma said that the bible had the answers. That’s armour you’re wearing, isn’t it, mister?’

Prophet forced himself to calm down. The pain in the dead flesh of his skull was nearly overwhelming. He could see white lights and wanted to scream.

‘You’re an angel, aren’t you, mister?’ He almost laughed and thought he felt like throwing up, if only he still could. The things he’d done made that question seem like an obscenity. ‘You’ve lost your wings. Is god angry at you?’

No, it just feels that way sometimes.

‘Alice!’ the harsh voice cut through the humid night air. ‘Where are you, you little bitch?! Get over here now or you’ll feel the back of my hand.’

Prophet didn’t like the sound of the voice. He stepped back and engaged the stealth mode. It was only then he saw how frightened Alice was.

Alcatraz had always tried to be hard where his mother was concerned. He’d had no problems about cutting her off after she’d been institutionalised. He’d always told himself that there’d been no guilt about never going to see her. Despite how she’d terrorised him growing up, Prophet knew this to be a lie.

When she’d ended up in the psych ward his, no, Alcatraz’s, dad had basically wasted away. He’d gone out with a whimper, not a bang. Alice had ended up in a foster home. There had been tear-filled conversations, with her older brother promising her that as soon as he was back home she could come and live with him.

‘Then I just went and died in New York. Sucks, huh?’ Prophet whipped around, looking for the source of the voice and seeing nothing. The weasel-faced man in the wifebeater, pyjama bottoms and, oddly, spats, must have heard something because he looked around to where Prophet was hidden. Deciding it was nothing he turned back to Alice. His bloodshot eyes full of anger. The girl was shaking with fear.

‘What’d I tell you?’ he demanded.

‘Which time?’ she asked, confused and terrified.

‘Are you trying to get fresh with me?’ He lifted his hand up as if to backhand her. She shrank away from it in a way that told Prophet she’d been hit plenty of times before.

‘Hey,’ Prophet said softly. The man froze. ‘Turn around.’ The man managed to control his fear long enough to do as he was told. He couldn’t see anything. He looked around and, still finding nothing, his fear was replaced with anger as he started to turn back towards Alice. Prophet made sure that the man saw him appear out of nowhere. The man let out a high-pitched scream. The scream was choked off as Prophet grabbed him by his chin and lifted him off the ground. The man soiled himself.

This I understand, this situation I can handle, the proper and correct application of fear and violence.

He could feel the man’s jaw crack and then splinter under his power-assisted fingers. The man was somehow still making whimpering and squealing noises as he drooled blood.

‘I could be anywhere and you’d never know,’ he whispered to the man. ‘You’re going to look after Alice and all the other children in your care to the best of your abilities. You will never raise a hand to them, or even an angry word. You will treat them with as much kindness as your resources will allow and you will stop drinking or doing whatever it is that turns you into a foul smelling, evil, little worm, because I will be checking. I will be checking frequently, and if I don’t like what I see I will remove limbs and solder the wounds shut. Do you understand me?’ The man didn’t answer. ‘I said, do you understand me?’

‘I don’t think he can talk,’ Alice managed through the terror. At the sound of her voice Prophet felt the guilt wash over him. He’d forgotten she was there. This was just another bit of violence for her to witness. He dropped the man, who curled up into a ball and made whimpering noises.

‘Get out of here,’ Prophet said quietly. The man didn’t move, he just whimpered. Prophet took a step towards him and the man made a run for it, scrambling away on all fours.

Prophet looked down on Alice.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘God will forgive him for his sins, and you.’

He felt like crying. He knew that this frightened young girl was concocting an elaborate fantasy around this strange figure she’d been confronted with. That he was an angel fallen from grace and that to earn his redemption he would watch over her and keep her safe. The awful knowledge that under the carboplatinum-reinforced coltan-titanium exoskeleton was the animated corpse of her older brother somehow made it all the more horrifying.

‘Did you mean what you said? Will you be watching over me?’

Prophet thought long and hard about lying. He desperately wanted to. He just wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t. She was far too nice, forgiving and naïve to survive in the situation she had found herself in.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘What I said was to frighten him into looking after you. It might work but probably only for a little while. You’ve got to be smart, keep your head down, keep out of his way and look for a safe way out as soon as you’re old enough, and I mean school not the streets, and Alice, you’ve got to learn to look after yourself, stand up to people. You don’t want to get in a fight if you can help it, but if they hit you, hit them back, harder. You understand me? God will understand.’ Or f*ck him, quite frankly.

She nodded, tears in her eyes. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.

‘I guess you’ve got other kids you’ve got to help, right?’ she asked through the tears, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

No. There’s the mission and only the mission, if your brother will let me.

He nodded, mumbled platitudes at her and then turned away. He made himself walk away by promising that he would come back and check up on her. There would have been tears in his eyes as he lied to himself, if he hadn’t been a walking corpse.

He all but staggered past the Green-Eyed Man from the alleyway, trying to ignore him. The man watched him pass. The expression in his eyes was unreadable.

‘Prophet?’

More voices in my head?

‘Prophet. I know you can hear me,’ The voice was familiar and it sounded like it had been trying to speak to him for some time. Prophet looked around at his surroundings and sighed. He’d lost time again. He was sat on a detritus-strewn beach. He wondered why the other guy never took him anywhere nice when he was in control as he watched a flock of scavenging seagulls take to the air. On the other hand, in the nanosuit, he guessed he was a little conspicuous.

‘Prophet, this silence helps neither of us. I think you’re in trouble and I think we can help.’

He recognised the voice now. Karl Rasch. The CEO of Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical. The company that had developed the living weapon that animated the distinctly unliving body he had stolen.

Hargreave-Rasch were also the parent company of CryNet Systems and CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics, the so-called “military contractors” who had spent a lot of time shooting at him in New York. He’d killed a lot of them, as well as a lot of Ceph.

‘I will find a way to break this comms link permanently,’ Prophet muttered. As he said it the HUD was already showing him options for the nanosuit’s comms as the suit’s heuristic systems went to work.

The Green-Eyed Man was back, looking intently at Prophet and listening to one side of the conversation. He was sat on a pile of driftwood, the seagulls ignoring him.

‘Is that a good idea?’ Rasch’s voice was cultured, educated, with a thick German accent. ‘You don’t sound well. We have the facilities to help you.’

‘It’s not over. I know what the Ceph are planning. We have no future . . .’ Prophet cursed himself. The Green-Eyed Man continued staring at him.

‘We can help you, we want the same things.’

‘Bullshit, you want to skin me. Use me, like your company always has.’ He remembered the argument he’d had with Psycho on Lingshan. The Brit had been convinced they were little more than test beds for Hargreave-Rasch’s experiments.

Rasch did not answer immediately.

‘You’re a soldier, Prophet. There has to be risks involved in that. There has to be somebody giving orders, and there have to be sacrifices. You – more than anyone – know what’s at stake,’ the old man said finally.

‘Yes, I do. I just don’t think that you’re the ones to deal with the problem.’

‘We want to deal with the Ceph as much as you do. And I need your help for that. There’s no future for any of us if the aliens take over.’

‘I want this planet to survive. You and your company just want to profit. Besides, are you sure there will be anything left of you after the Congressional Inquiry?’

There was a dry chuckle over the comms link. ‘I think we both know that’s not how things like that work.’

No, consequences are for poorer people, Prophet thought.

‘I’m not coming in. I don’t trust you, and I have a job to do. I know the Ceph are still active out there, and I know you’re looking for them as well.’

It was hollow machismo and Prophet knew it. The comms link went quiet again.

‘The way you integrated with the Ceph tech in New York may make you our greatest hope. I think you’re having problems. We’re not sure what happened. We’re not sure how your personality survived but we do think that it’s affecting you. A conflict with the remnants of callsign Alcatraz’s personality.’

You mean the mind that this body belongs to? Prophet looked over at the Green-Eyed Man. He was smiling at Prophet. The smile had little humour in it.

‘Being Hargreave’s puppet got people under my command killed. It got me killed. It got this poor bastard whose mind I’m riding around in killed, and as much as I enjoy your Victor Frankenstein impression, I’m not coming in. You know what I’m going after. If you say that we’re after the same thing, if you truly want the Ceph defeated, keep your people out of my way.’

‘You know that’s not going to be possible. I don’t have control over all of CELL’s people. Working with us will be the best way to accomplish your mission. I know there are some . . . wrong-headed elements in this company, but you can trust me. You need to come in. The Monster lived a lonely existence and came to a cruel end . . .’

The suit showed him the way to sever the comms link. He did so and then audited the suit’s internal systems, looking for any other ways that Hargreave-Rasch or CELL could contact, or worse, track him against his will, but he found none.

‘What am I to you?’ the Green-Eyed Man asked him. ‘The zombie that carries you around? A drone, a weapons platform that you’re the operating system for? What?’

Prophet put his head down and tried to ignore him. He heard the Green-Eyed Man laugh.

‘You think I’m going to go away?’ Suddenly the Green-Eyed Man was kneeling down next to him. ‘Know what I think? The suit becomes your skin. We’re superhuman, yeah, but the sensors still feed back everything directly to our nervous system once the suit fuses with flesh. We still feel every hit, every shot or knife wound, each fall or burn. Feels like we’ve died a thousand times, doesn’t it? That’s what I think I am to you. I’m armour. I’m here to soak that shit up. All the pain.’

Prophet finally looked up.

‘I think you’re here because you’re trying to hold on.’

He was just talking to the sky. The Green-Eyed Man was gone.

‘I know you’re in here.’ The voice had the surety of a fanatic. Prophet had heard its like before, in the Middle East, in Columbia.

He was in a small institutional room. It was bare except for a bed with restraints. The window was small and made of thick, reinforced safety glass. It was some kind of psych ward. He’d visited men and women who’d once been under his command in places like this before.

The woman strapped to the bed was gaunt to the point of cadaverous. Although washed-out, her features lacked the slackness of the long-term institutionalised. Instead she looked alert, intent, but there was more than a little madness in her eyes. She must have been in her late forties or early fifties, far too young for Alzheimer’s this severe.

He’d come to as if waking, alert, from a deep but dreamless sleep. He was in the corner of the room. The nanosuit’s stealth mode was engaged. The lensing field bent light around him. In theory it make him invisible.

‘Show yourself,’ the woman hissed. Apparently he wasn’t invisible enough to hide from Alcatraz’s mother. ‘And there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains. Because he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces. Neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.’

There was just something about quoting the Bible, Prophet thought, which meant you could always find relevance somewhere to your current situation.

He had no idea what to do. If he showed himself to the woman then he would just be torturing her, further feeding into the religious aspects of her dementia. On the other hand, she already knew he was here. Alcatraz must have given himself away.

Now you decide to visit your mother? He was more than a little pissed off. Maybe torturing her had been the point. Maybe this was payback.

C’mon Alcatraz, you’re better than this, Prophet thought. He wasn’t sure if the distant answering howls of rage were his imagination or not.

‘Son?’ she asked.

Shit.

‘Mom?’ Prophet found himself whispering.

Where the f*ck had that come from?

The madness was gone from her eyes. He saw only what you were supposed to see in a mother’s eyes – unconditional love.

The lensing field collapsed as it ran out of energy. How long was I stood there for? How long was she raving at the invisible ghost in her room? He glanced down at her wrists and ankles, which had been rubbed raw and bloody by the restraints. This must be more than Alzheimer’s, he decided. There was an aspect of religious mania to whatever was wrong with her.

She looked up at near-enough six and a half feet of armoured-carbon nanomyfibrils with recognition and love in her eyes.

Then, with a sinking sensation, he watched her face harden.

‘You’re not my son,’ she said, her voice laced with venom and suspicion. Was he supposed to say something, Prophet wondered? ‘Who are you!? Where’s my son?’

I’m the ghost possessing your son’s corpse. He died fighting aliens.

‘He was a good boy.’ She wasn’t looking at him now. ‘Oh, he did wild things. Some days I thought there was the devil in him, but I knew, deep down, he was a good boy. He serves his God and his country, you know?’ she said with pride, and then looked up at him, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

‘Ma’am.’ What are you doing, Prophet? he demanded of himself. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’ Her eyes were shining with tears now. It was the start of the conversation that all family members of soldiers dreaded, and she knew it. Some part of her, the lucid part, would have been expecting it ever since her son had joined the Marine Corps. ‘Your son was killed in action. In New York.’ New York, Prophet thought, we weren’t supposed to die in New York. We were supposed to die in places like Iraq, Columbia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lingshan. Foreign places, exotic places, not the Big Apple. ‘He fought hard, he died bravely. He was a credit to his fellow marines, the Corps itself and his country,’ he finished meekly. He could hear the hollowness of the platitudes in his own words.

‘It was the violence, wasn’t it? And the drugs they gave you. And fallen women. They follow soldiers like flies to excrement. And the drink, all your friends would want you to drink with them. You were always such a popular boy. Is that how it got in?’

Now he was her son again, it seemed. Prophet told himself that he just needed to leave. This was accomplishing nothing. Suddenly she looked up at him again. The madness was back in her eyes again, stronger than ever. Righteous hatred was written across her severe features.

‘Was that how the demons entered your flesh? They try and put them in my body, with the needles and the pills, but my faith is strong. God and his angels watch over the righteous. They protect their own. I saw the devils on the net in the common room. They were walking the streets of Sodom-on-the-Hudson! Bold as brass! Hell has boiled up like a blister and burst in the streets of New York!’ She was thrashing around in the bed like a woman possessed. Her arms and her ankles were bleeding. Spittle flecked her mouth and chin. ‘I know what you are, demon! Get out of my son’s body!’

She was praying. Screaming her exhortations to God, trying to cast the possessing demon out of her son’s body, when the orderlies arrived to sedate her. Prophet bent light around himself. It wasn’t difficult to sneak out of the room.

The daughter had seen an angel. The mother had seen a demon. Prophet guessed that the daughter had more hope. He was worried that the mother was closer to the truth.

What do you want from me? Prophet demanded. But the Green-Eyed Man was nowhere to be seen.

The pain in his skull was so extreme that he was staggering. He had only just managed to get out of the hospital without being detected. He sank to his knees. This couldn’t go on. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing half the time. Sooner or later he was going to get seen and caught. By the local authorities if he was lucky, by CELL if he wasn’t.

He was beginning to think that Rasch was right, that they were the only ones who could help him. He just didn’t think they would. The mission was nowhere. If this continued then all he was doing was trying to avoid the inevitable when he was lucid and in control and rushing toward it when he wasn’t.

White light. Agony. The pavement was rushing up to meet him but he blacked out before it reached him.

Somehow he knew he was moving. He was being just stealthy enough to avoid being seen by civilians and police. It wasn’t like he was trying to hide from military contractors or hostile aliens. If he was to remain fused to this suit, which was now synonymous with remaining alive, then this was just a stroll for him. This level of sneaking about would become his life until he got careless, got caught and got dead.

Except Prophet knew he was just a passenger now.

‘I think we need to talk.’

Prophet opened his eyes. The Green-Eyed Man was sat opposite him. They were both sat at a simple table in an otherwise empty room with bare walls. The day outside the window looked grey and bleak. The landscape beyond the glass was featureless.

‘Is this real?’ Prophet asked.

The Green-Eyed Man pointed at him. ‘I want my body back.’

‘You’re dead.’

‘Which makes us equal. I watched you put a bullet in your own head, except the dead flesh you’re possessing came with my mind when I was born. Not yours.’

Prophet wanted to smile. The kid was cocky but he thought he wouldn’t have minded having him under his command. The smile went away as he remembered just how many people had died under his command. That was a whole different set of ghosts.

‘What is this? Where are we?’

The Green-Eyed Man frowned. ‘I think you’re changing the subject.’

Prophet noticed that he wasn’t wearing the armour anymore. He was in dress fatigues that he hadn’t worn in years.

‘Just because you outrank me doesn’t give you the right to take my body.’

‘There is no right here. There’s just what happened, and there’s dealing with it.’

‘You could let go, old man.’

‘So could you.’

‘It’s my f*cking body!’ The Green-Eyed Man lunged across the table and grabbed Prophet by the lapels of his dress uniform. Prophet didn’t move. Instead he took the time to stare deep into the other man’s eyes. Taking stock of him, measuring and, if he was honest, judging him.

‘I don’t know where we are, but do you think this will help?’ Prophet asked quietly. Alcatraz slumped back into his seat, calmer. He looked fatigued. I guess haunting someone really takes it out of you, Prophet thought. The Green-Eyed Man looked up at him.

‘I’m not haunting you. I’m haunting my body.’

‘Is that what you are? A ghost?’

‘Maybe. Or a partially erased program, or information given form by the suit’s systems. Or maybe I’m just you having a breakdown. Ever consider that? What about you? What do you think you are?’

‘I’m Proph . . .’ he started.

‘You used to be Laurence Barnes, didn’t you?’

‘I still . . .’

‘He’s dead. Maybe you died when you put the suit on, maybe when you put the gun to your head, but you’re dead now. You’re a ghoul inhabiting a stolen corpse, a demon possessing a body, a Frankenstein’s monster of animated dead flesh and alien technology.’

‘You sound like your mother.’ Prophet had meant it as a provocation.

He watched Alcatraz’s face harden.

‘F*ck that bitch.’

Yeah? Who are you trying to fool, kid? Prophet was pretty sure that wasn’t even how Alcatraz spoke. That was language learnt for the barracks. A front. Prophet shrugged.

‘So?’ he asked. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘For you to let go. To get out.’

‘What are you going to do with your life?’

‘What are you, my dad?’

He’d have needed beating into shape first if he had been under my command, Prophet decided. The conversation was starting to sound like the arguments he’d overheard between his sister and her teenaged kids.

‘It’s a serious question.’

‘What life?’

‘Semantics? Really?’ Prophet was becoming more exasperated.

‘No, that’s the thing, see? I’m not being semantic. I’m going to lay myself to rest. We’re both dead. We need to let go. We’re just a grotesque joke now.’

There’s more of your mother in you than you’d like to admit, isn’t there, son? Prophet thought but decided to keep it to himself.

‘Sorry. I need your body for something more important.’

‘Like what? We’re a corpse in a f*cking suit.’

‘Did you just forget about New York? The fact that we’re being invaded by alien squid?’

‘That’s f*cking over, man. I . . . we dealt with that shit.’

‘It’s not over.’ The Green-Eyed Man swallowed. Prophet looked at him hard. It was the sort of stare he’d given subordinates back when he’d been conventional army, 82nd Airborne, before Delta. Prophet tapped the side of his head. ‘Yeah, you’ve seen it, haven’t you, son?’ Alcatraz didn’t answer. ‘You fought hard. You did well. You were a good soldier . . . and I’m sorry – I really am – but your war’s over.’ The Green-Eyed Man opened his mouth to retort, but Prophet cut him off. ‘What do you think you’ve been doing? Visiting your sister? Your mother? Where are we now . . .?’

‘We’re here. You need to . . .’

‘Where are we in the real world? You’re saying goodbye, son. I’m sorry you died. I think you’ve more than earned your rest, but I need your flesh and you’re just going to have to take my word for it that it’s important. If you know what I know, if you’ve seen what I’ve seen, then you won’t even have to take my word for it.’

‘It’s my body,’ Alcatraz said quietly.

‘Do you want to fight this war?’ Prophet asked. More and more he himself was starting to realise that he didn’t want to fight the coming war either. He just didn’t see any other way.

‘It’s over,’ Prophet told him. ‘It was over before it began, and I think you know that. You’re right, this is your body, and I think that if you’d really wanted it you would have taken it by now.’

Prophet watched the knowledge settle in, the resignation. Tension leaked out of the other man. Prophet stood up. He smoothed down his uniform and then held out his hand. Alcatraz stared at the offered grip. Prophet couldn’t quite read the expression on the Recon Marine’s face. Finally Alcatraz stood up.

‘Alice?’ he asked.

The mission, Prophet thought.

‘I’ll look in on her when I can.’ He almost believed the lie himself.

Alcatraz nodded.

‘What’s your name, son?’

Alcatraz told him.

He was stood alone in a graveyard under a slate grey sky. He looked down at the gravestone.

A heuristic system: experience-based problem solving. In other words, learning. Just how smart is the suit? Prophet wondered. Then he corrected himself. How smart was the alien tech in the suit? The Ceph were a reactive species, they responded to external stimuli. Once something had happened to them they would change their approach the next time round, and the next, until they either succeeded or were destroyed. The suit had known there was something wrong with Prophet. Or rather, it had known there was something wrong with its CPU. Had it found a way to fix it, he wondered? Or had it made a choice between Prophet and Alcatraz? Prophet found that he didn’t want to think too hard about that possibility . . .

It was only then that he realised just how envious he was of Alcatraz’s peace, even if that peace was merely oblivion.

He thought back to something a senior NCO had told him during training: In a fire-fight, you find cover or you find religion. It didn’t seem that Alcatraz had had much of a choice.

He looked down at Alcatraz’s father’s grave. Then he turned and walked away, with the marine’s last words ringing in his ears.

‘They call me Alcatraz. Remember me.’