Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (2 page)

I pass the shell of an old bus stop. It's only a frame now, the glass shattered out by nu-rockers a generation ago, its metal posts slowly wilting in the steady blast of the sun.

I walk the empty car park with memories bubbling up around me. We came here together and all held hands. The park was already dead, but still we'd come to play. I step over regimented lines for parking spaces scrawled over the tarmac like crazy paving, in places erased by time, soil accretion, creeping moss. Cracks have lifted sections, dropped others into the ocean, driven by the rising tide.

A different life.

It grows very dark close to the entrance, and I can see nothing but a faint glow from the distant satellite-lights overhead. Barbed wire rustles in my hair as I clamber over the turnstile. In and through, I see boulderlike shapes lying around in the shadows. I touch them as I pass, and feel the heat of the sun still buzzing within their lifeless frames. They are toppled fishing boats. Once upon a time the waters tipped them up and left their undersides showing for the vultures to pick clean.

Down the main promenade there is jungle to either side of me. I still smell the refining sugar, but it is fading. Instead my mind tells me I smell caramel popcorn, the acrid burn of fireworks exploding overhead, the flowery shampoo smell of Mem's hair as she pulls me down to whisper in my ear:

"This is wonderful, Daddy."

The memory of a memory. None of us saw this place alive.

I walk up the steep wooden rollercoaster tracks to the apex of the dive, rising far above the land below. Here is my tower, standing at the turning point, complete and thick with bonds. No crows have dislodged its turrets or parapets. No shelving units have been hung up by the homeless.

It is only my Tower. I am the only one who ever saw it, and built it with everything I had, bricks chipped away from other buildings, bits of rail-line gleaned rusting in the weeds, cement powder I scraped from the undersides of ceramic sinks. I bonded it with all my memories. Atop the coaster it stands as tall as the Calico wall.

I enter the Tower through the one entrance, and begin the slow ascent up the circling staircase. As I move up, I let the backs of my fingers trace the wall. The surface is rough, unpolished, like granular stucco. For a month I wattle-framed it, heaping on thick handfuls of liquid plaster, dusting in every memento I had.

He had already shredded all the photographs, and given me the fragments. He had torn up their clothes and their toys, their drawings and their letters, and gave me the pieces. I kept every tiny scrap, and built it into the Tower.

This Tower is made of memory. It is a cast of my life and the life of my family, of Art and Mem and Loralena. It is what remains, and the reason my mind is so clear.

Because I'm going to take my family back.

The hairs on the backs of my fingers tingle in the charged air. I have known this pain for so long. I feel it like static electricity, a wellspring of power, now focused.

I arrive at the top, and look out over the park and the world. It is all in shadow. I look up to the sky and see the endless reams of satellites, most of them fallen silent now, circling across the silent moon. I look across the land and see the twin cities I've forsaken, both Calico and the floating sprawl of proto-Calico hugging the tsunami wall like a shadow. This is all our land, and our swollen seas, and the fragments of life we have left.

I touch the wheel, by which I will steer myself home. It is as large as the wheel on a subglacic, connected to vents and flue shafts all throughout the Tower, and a rope hanging down the stairs. Everything is perfectly balanced.

I am ready, just as I always was as a marine in the Arctic skirmishes, ready to fight for my right to exist. I lay my hands on the smooth wheel's handles and allow myself a brief moment to repeat the terms of the deal I made with Mr. Ruins all that time ago.

If it doesn't work.

That thought doesn't hold fear for me anymore. It is an answer either way. I can't be hurt anymore, and my family can't be hurt any worse if I am gone than if I am alive.

I lift the wheel and it clicks to engage. I feel the wind about me rush to fill in the ventricles the Tower has opened. The cement beneath my feet vibrates. I turn the wheel, and the thumping begins.

I feel the wave rise.

It's beginning.

And I dive.

MOVEMENT 1. MOLTEN CORE

NOW A

Her brain is starting to burn.

We're in the dive-bay on the graysmithy third floor, enclosed by the thumping metal bulk of the Electro-Magnetic Resonance machine, lying face to face like lovers. Her name is Mei-An, a sweet-looking meta-Asiat with black face-framing bangs to die for, and I am Ritry Goligh, graysmith to the floating slums beyond the tsunami wall, ex-marine of the Arctic skirmishes, and all-round un-rooted loner.

I'm working to smooth an Afri-Jarvanese language inject into Mei-An's mind, but it isn't taking well. Her immunity's kicking in, the Lag, and without a deeper dive it'll fry her badly, losing the language inject and along with it a million or so neurons.

"Dopamine's up," my assistant Carrolla calls from behind, barely audible over the whump whump whump of the EMR around us. "Get it calmed Rit."

I'm looking into her eyes, big dark orbs blinking and disoriented, and reading in. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, into hostile minds bent backward by chemical interference, searching for troop movements and stock-pile stations in the old deep Arctic floes while the skirmishes were at their peak, but still it never gets any easier, or safer.

I can feel the Lag snapping up at me from within her head.

"Look at me, yes," I say to Mei-An, as I slowly tongue my brain's core-transponders into stronger resonance with her own. "Look at my eyes, Mei-An, that's it."

She tries to nod but I can see she's glitching on motor control too, the motion uneven and jerky. I kick a leg at Carrolla to up the Cerebro Spinal Fluid bath, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull those neurons really will begin to cook, then I slide my wavelength all the way down to match with hers.

A precautionary warning pops up across my thoughts and I chew it accepted, opening the file of her mind in my own, glancing through a stream of data that encapsulates billions of individual cells and their action potential state.

Then I dive.

I squeeze her hand and keep my eyes on hers. All this is a formality now, outer layers of data in the cortex before the real mingling begins. A tear leaks down her cheek, and distantly I can feel her terror. This far out, her higher functions like emotion don't resonate well, though soon I'll be in the thick of it, and I won't feel anything so discrete as terror, fear, even love. It'll all be magma.

I dive harder, and columns of numbers flash by me like the Allatanc ocean in tsunami- dopamine counts spiking, the firing rate shooting up, glia beginning to crisp now too, the Brodmann's for speech flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.

"Dammit Rit she's slipping," I hear Carrolla faintly from behind.

I plunge through the readouts and deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her basal ganglia, blasting by pyramidal neurons both afferent and efferent, so deep I lose my grip on the world and the sense of my own body flits away. Now I'm beyond the confines of the machine and into the realm where my mind meets hers.

The Molten Core.

All around me is lava, the burning red and orange fire of memory.

It's bright and chaotic with the churning of her thoughts, as the language inject is attacked by the Lag, her mind's engrammic immune system. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by the tidal flows, bound for the Solid Core.

They wouldn't do this kind of thing in Calico. No one does this kind of dive anymore, maybe beyond the wall they don't need to, they have the tech to bypass it completely, but out here it's the only thing that'll save a good chunk of sweet Mei-An's brain.

Everything is to play for now.

My sublavic ship coalesces around me, crewed by the facets of my mind and built out of pure attention. I man the periscope at the con and order propulsion to bank for the central memory near her Solid Core, by which to orient myself and bring the chaos into order.

The screw churns us forward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava, frazzled hints of who this girl is and was. I glimpse her slinging back gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum-piercing, see her making her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don.

The Lag snaps up at me with ravenous meat-jaws from the magma, and I launch a few sacrificial thoughts as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the blue-tarp park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me- Arclo-berry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them, and for the moment the Lag is distracted.

The sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I sight the radiant outreach of what I'm looking for, embodied as liquid sound. It is waves pulsing through the magma with the steady thump thump, thump thump, that is utterly unique, the key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture.

This is her mother's pulse. It is the primordial memory, locked away in the Solid Core at the heart of her mind.

I don't need to surface through the lava and into the moat of air encircling her Soid Core, I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg. The sublavic stores its pattern, turns, and I unleash the sound outward through the ocean of lava, amplifying it to settle the Lag's immune reaction. It is soothed by the gentle lullaby memory of the womb. I leash the sound and drag it back and away from the Solid Core with me, bathing Mei-An's mind with the right kind of CSF, tinged with harmonics too complex for any machine to reproduce.

I feel her dopamine levels calming through the flow of lava, the brain-rate flow settling down, and pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my sublavic's bridge. Numbers flash up in green across the periscope, as the panic spike of rejection stills beneath the smoothing pulse.

Thump thump, thump thump.

Sound is the first memory formed in the neonate's brain. Though all other sound is also heard dimly across the mother's belly wall, muted and simplified like the sublavic's Engine Order Telegraph bell, it's the pulse that sounds the loudest for that forming seed in its amniotic sac.

Thump thump.

The pulse is goddess, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like it was soft clay, shaping it in its own image, instilling it with a unique engrammic immunity. 

That same immunity will still scrub the language engram-inject if I'm not careful, so I race to Brodmann's zone where Carrolla first injected the Afri-Jarvanese pack, in the crevice between the tail-end of the optic nerve and the auditory cortex. There I massage the pulse around the engram's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells lining the language dump and pets the Lag on its head like a trusty old dog.

I sigh with metaphorical relief, and turn to the Lag.

"Can I have my Arcloberry back?" I ask it, a wordless information request through the CSF. I remember the memory because I only gave the content not the frame, but the Lag is mute on its refund policy.

"Walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."

It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more in the past, and at least I have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?    

Dammit. I pull outward, feel my body and the sublavic ship merging back into one as my thoughts suck free of hers, rushing up a tunnel of data and figures as my mind disengages, then I'm out again, and panting hard in the decelerating whump whump of the EMR machine, back in the graysmithy office.

I'm leaning over her still, looking down on her dark eyes staring back at me. I notice I've drooled on her face. Oh man, that looks bad. I hastily rub it off, my arm a bit jerky as the gears of my brain slot back into sync. She doesn't notice, she's totally out.

Then the tray engages, and we're sliding out of the quieting machine together, into the filtered gray light of the dive-room. 

"Strong work Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.

It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this, and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.

I roll off Mei-An and look up at my employee Carrolla. He's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I've never asked him, but I think he must have been a marine too, at least had the training. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know, but he never served his time. He's too young for it, has way too much energy.

I've always imagined this skulk is his skirmish. proto-Calico. It makes him a tourist, but I can't complain about that. Having him around makes me feel good.

"Fine work, really excellent," he's still saying, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"

I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray, sit up with my back away from the girl. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.

"Not bad," I say. My tongue feels thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me hold it up while I take a sip. Better.

"Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"

He frowns. "What, you gave up the juice? Hell no, Rit, that cost me 20. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of that?"

I shrug. "It came to mind."