Chapter 15
1526 Words
The car smelled of stale cigarette smoke and ozone.
It was a hover-sedan, something that looked like a '57 Chevy mated with a fighter jet. The dashboard was a clutter of analog dials and holographic displays.
Johnny Vane drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the plasma tommy gun in the passenger seat.
"Keep your heads down," Johnny shouted over the roar of the thrusters. " The Management has the sky patrols out in force tonight. Must be looking for something shiny."
Maya sat in the back, squeezed between Elias and Sae. Leo sat on the floor, furiously twisting his Rubik's Cube.
Maya couldn't take her eyes off the rearview mirror. She stared at Johnny’s eyes.
They were green. The same green. But they lacked the fanaticism of the Julian she knew. These eyes were tired. Cynical.
"You're staring, sweetheart," Johnny said, meeting her gaze in the mirror. "Take a picture, it lasts longer. Though in this city, pictures have a nasty habit of fading."
"Who are you?" Maya whispered.
"I told you," he said, banking the car hard to the left to avoid a neon billboard advertising Synthetic Dreams. "Johnny Vane. Private Investigator. Finder of lost things. Occasional nuisance to the corporate overlords."
"You look like..." Maya started, then stopped.
"Like someone you know?" Johnny smirked. "I get that a lot. The Bleed likes to recycle assets. There’s probably five of me running around this city alone. One’s a bartender. One’s a begger. I like to think I’m the best looking of the bunch."
"The others..." Sae asked, leaning forward. "Are they... like you?"
"Different forks in the road, sister," Johnny said. "Different choices. In this timeline, I didn't take the scholarship. I dropped out. Got drafted. Became a cynic instead of a savior."
The car shuddered as a spotlight swept over them.
"Hold on," Johnny growled. "Eraser drone at six o'clock."
He flipped a switch on the dash. Cloak.
The car’s engine hum changed pitch. The world outside the windows blurred. Johnny dove the car down, plunging into the labyrinth of steel canyons near the water level.
They wove between the massive stilts that held the city above the black ocean. The rain lashed against the windshield.
"Where are we going?" Elias groaned. He was clutching his shoulder. The pixelated wound was spreading, turning his neck grey and blocky.
"My office," Johnny said. "You got a corrupted file in your shoulder, pal. If we don't patch it, you're going to de-rez."
THE OFFICE
Johnny Vane’s office was located above a noodle shop that smelled of ginger and gasoline.
The sign on the frosted glass door read: VANE INVESTIGATIONS. NO GODS. NO MASTERS.
Johnny kicked the door open. "Make yourselves at home. Don't touch the whiskey, it’s radioactive."
The room was a mess of paper files and glowing data-pads. A ceiling fan spun lazily, slicing through the smoke.
"Table," Johnny pointed.
They laid Elias down on a metal desk. He was shivering. His left arm was almost entirely transparent now; Maya could see the desk through his flesh.
"It’s a deletion algorithm," Leo said, standing on a chair to get a better look. "The Eraser bit him. It injected a Null string."
"Can you fix it?" Maya asked, panic rising in her chest.
"I can’t," Leo said. "I can change geometry, not code."
Johnny sighed. He took off his trench coat and threw it on a rack. He rolled up his sleeves. He had tattoos on his forearms—barcodes.
"Lucky for you," Johnny said, "I used to do tech support for the Mob."
He opened a drawer and pulled out a device that looked like a soldering iron mixed with a syringe.
"Hold him down," Johnny ordered.
Maya grabbed Elias’s good shoulder. Sae grabbed his legs.
"This is gonna sting," Johnny said. "I have to overwrite the Null string with raw data."
He jammed the needle into the pixelated wound.
Elias screamed.
The needle hummed. Johnny tapped commands into a keypad on the device.
"Come on, come on..." Johnny muttered. "Accept the patch..."
Blue light flared from the wound. The grey pixels flickered, then solidified back into flesh and blood.
Elias gasped and went limp, unconscious.
"He’ll live," Johnny said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Though he might have a craving for static for a few days."
He walked over to a cabinet, poured himself a glass of glowing amber liquid, and downed it.
He turned to Maya. He leaned against the window, silhouetted by the neon rain outside.
"Alright," Johnny said. "You owe me a new capacitor for that medical unit. Now talk. Why is the Insurance Adjuster chasing a couple of refugees and a kid?"
Maya looked at him. It was so hard to separate the face from the monster.
"We broke the world," Maya said.
Johnny laughed. A dry, humorless bark. "Join the club. Everyone here broke a world. That’s what New Atlantis is. A refugee camp for failed timelines."
"No," Maya said. "We didn't just fail a timeline. We went to the Source. We tried to reset the Grid."
Johnny stopped laughing. He lowered his glass.
"You went to the Axis?" he asked quietly.
"Yes."
"And?"
"And we let the outside in," Maya said. "The Bleed."
Johnny stared at her. He walked closer. He looked at her face, really looked at her, as if searching for a hidden file.
"Maya," he whispered. The name felt strange in his mouth. "I had a dream about a Maya once. In the dream, she was smarter than me."
"She was," Sae said from the corner.
Johnny smirked. "Touché."
He sat on the edge of the desk.
"If you went to the Axis, that means you had the Key. The Stone."
"We lost it," Maya lied. She didn't trust him yet. "The explosion scattered us."
"Liar," Johnny said softly. "You don't lose a thing like that. It loses you."
He pointed at Leo.
"And the kid? Why is a Vector with you?"
"He found us," Maya said. "He says we need to go to the Archive."
Johnny rubbed his face. "The Archive. Of course. Everyone wants to go to the Archive. It’s the backup server for the planet. It’s where the Resistance keeps the 'Golden Timeline' stored."
"Can you take us there?" Maya asked.
Johnny shook his head. "Can't. It’s locked down. The Resistance barricaded themselves inside the City Library three cycles ago. No one gets in, no one gets out. They’re waiting for a Savior."
He looked at Maya.
"I'm guessing that’s you."
"I'm no savior," Maya said. "I'm just the one who broke the lock."
"Same thing," Johnny said.
He stood up. He walked to the window and looked out at the rain-soaked city.
"If you want to get into the Archive, you need a Backdoor. And I know the only guy in town who has one."
"Who?"
"Me," Johnny said. "But not this me."
He turned around.
"There’s another variant. A darker one. He runs the underworld here. He calls himself The Architect. He collects secrets."
"Another Julian?" Maya felt sick.
"Yeah," Johnny said. "He’s the one who made it big. He’s got a penthouse in the Spire. If anyone knows how to crack the Archive, it’s him."
"Why would he help us?" Sae asked.
"He won't," Johnny said, grabbing his trench coat. "That’s why we’re going to rob him."
THE PLAN
Leo sat on the floor, mapping the city with his Rubik's Cube.
"The Spire is surrounded by a gravity well," Leo said, pointing to a floating holographic tower on his map. "You can't fly a car up there. The physics are set to 'Crush'."
"Correct," Johnny said, checking the charge on his plasma gun. "So we don't fly. We climb."
"Climb?" Elias croaked, sitting up. He looked pale but lucid. "Climb a skyscraper?"
"Not the outside," Johnny said. " The elevator shaft. The service lift bypasses the gravity well. But we need a biometric key to call it."
Johnny looked at Maya.
"The Architect is a narcissist. He coded his security to his own DNA. Or..."
He pointed at Maya.
"...to the DNA of the one person he couldn't save."
"Me," Maya realized.
"In his timeline," Johnny said, "you died. And he broke the world trying to bring you back. If you walk up to that scanner, it won't see an intruder. It will see a ghost."
Maya felt a chill. Every version of Julian was defined by her, just as she was defined by him. They were quantum entangled across the multiverse.
"This is a trap," Sae said.
"Life is a trap," Johnny said, throwing a spare pistol to Maya. "The trick is to chew your leg off before the hunter comes back."
He opened the door.
"Let’s go. If we’re lucky, we can break into the penthouse, steal the bypass codes, and get to the Archive before the Insurance Adjuster finishes his paperwork."
Maya caught the gun. It felt heavy.
She looked at this rough, scarred version of her best friend.
"Johnny?"
"Yeah, kid?"
"Thank you."
Johnny pulled his hat down low.
"Don't thank me yet. You haven't met the other guy."
- Writer
