Technobabel Read online

  I know I’ve got to find some way to get out of here. Buried in the hot darkness and the smell of decay and disinfectant, I take stock of the situation. I cannot make my muscles work the way they should, but I can still feel my hands and my feet, the sensation of the vinyl body-bag against my skin, the way I rest on top of the bodies supporting me, the motion of the van as it moves. My mind is a jumble of thoughts and images. I was expecting to see someone else. Someone else was to come and find me, not these body-snatchers looking for corpses.

  Why can’t I move? I try to figure out what could have happened to cause this. I can still feel everything. Neither my limbs nor my skin are numb. I dismiss the possibility of injury causing my paralysis. The idea makes me ill, and, if it’s true, there’s not much hope of getting out of here. I push the thoughts aside. No point in dwelling on what I can’t change.

  Drugs? I don’t think so. I don’t feel sedated or drugged. My mind is sharp and awake. It might be a drug I don’t know, but, again, there isn’t much I can do if that’s the case. Best to consider the other possibilities.

  Magic? It’s possible. There are spells to paralyze and control people. I know something about the theory behind them. Magicians have the ability to do such things, but I can’t recall ever having been under a spell. Thinking about magic makes me feel strange. There’s something I don’t remember about it. Something important, but it doesn’t help me with my present problem.

  There’s the possibility of the BTLs Riley talked about. Better Than Life chips—beetles—were things plenty of people plugged into their brains to experience feelings and sensations more pleasurable and intense than anything real life had to offer, supposedly. I dimly recall a feeling like that, feelings deeper and broader than anything I thought a human body and mind could contain. A sense of being so large, so vast, but it slips away from me even as I try to grab hold of it. Was I using chips in the alley? Is my current condition the result of neural damage to my motor centers? I can’t remember.

  The way I’m lying on top of the stack of bodies is giving me a painful pull at the base of my neck. I long to raise my head or to roll over to a more comfortable position. I focus on the pain, let it fill my thoughts. I pour all of my effort into making my body roll over to the side. Just a little contraction of the muscles. Just a slight change in position. That’s it. Should be easy. Nothing to it.

  I start to sweat inside the confinement of the body bag, and I can feel the air getting hot and stale. The sound of my own breathing is loud in the confinement, but I focus on it to remind me I’m still alive and I try to quicken its pace. I need more air, more oxygen to my muscles and my brain to try and speed their recovery. If they can recover, that is .. . No, I can’t let myself think that way. I have to be able to move or there’s no chance at all.

  The meat-wagon takes a corner hard, and I throw all of my strength into rolling with the movement. There! I manage to roll onto my back on top of the other bodies, and I think I can feel someone’s arm under my lower back, as if it were holding me in an embrace. It isn’t much, but I moved.

  I start concentrating on my hands and my feet. They are tingling a bit and, with some effort, I can almost move them. The paralysis gripping my body is starting to fade,

  I can feel it. I concentrate on trying to move, trying to find my voice, to bring my mind back into synch with my body. That’s it. I feel like my mind has lost touch with my body, like I’ve only forgotten how to use it properly. If I could only open my eyes. Of course, all there is to see right now is the inside of a dark body bag. I just need to try a little harder.

  We slow to a stop, and the driver kills the engine. We’ve arrived somewhere. I start to work feverishly to regain some movement, any kind of movement. I have to tell them I’m not dead, that they’ve made a mistake. I have to get out of here. I hear the doors of the van clunk open, and I can hear the men talking again. Weizack is saying something about the Urban Brawl game he lost some money on last night. His partner Riley just grunts in response to his ramblings.

  Rough hands lift me out of the back of the van, and I try to squirm or struggle inside the body bag to tell these two they’re not handling a corpse. I manage to flex my hands a bit, curling the fingers in to form fists, but I still can’t move my arms. The thought of Weizack and his chummer dropping me in fright and cracking my skull on whatever is under me if I move flashes briefly through my mind. I could end up needing a body bag for real then, but I have to try and make them aware of me.

  Then I hear a new voice speaking.

  "Is this him?" the voice asks, barely audible through the thick vinyl body bag. The sound of it is low and whispery.

  "Yeah, right where you said he would be," Weizack says, his voice gone flat and cold. The newcomer is obviously not a friend.

  "Let me see," the other whispers.

  I am lowered to the ground, and someone unzips the body bag. There is a rush of cool night air, and a foul stench assaults my nostrils. It is the smell of death and decay from the meat-wagon, but much worse and without the acidic tang of the disinfectant to cover it. The touch of the cool air and the terrible smell send another surge of adrenaline through my system, and I fight to move or see what is going on.

  "Good, good," the new voice whispers, and I shiver a bit at the sound. Did they see that? "He’s still in good shape, his aura is still bright and strong."

  A dry hand gently caresses my cheek and I nearly gag at the touch. It’s like the touch of a corpse. I can feel sharp nails like claws just barely grazing my skin.

  "Ah, fresh meat," the same voice whispers again with a sigh of pleasure, sending a whiff of hot, foul breath wafting across my face. Hearing those words, I regain some control over myself. My eyes snap open and I stare up into what looks like the face of death itself. The figure crouched above me is pale and hairless, with skin tinged the gray of the grave and drawn tight over his bones. Thin lips curl back in a cruel smile, exposing sharp teeth that remind me of a small, meat-eating animal. A narrow tongue of a darker shade of gray emerges to lick his lips like a man sitting down to a feast. His hands are bony claws tipped with sharp, rending nails, and his eyes are the worst of all. White and blind, they seem to focus on my face, and yet look past my flesh as if they were peering straight into my soul.

  "Good evening," the gray figure whispers to me, and I realize it is night, the dark sky covered with a gray shroud of clouds. I also realize neither my two "handlers" nor the creature crouching above me are surprised or shocked to see me awake. They know I’m not dead, and the implications break over me like a wave. If they knew I was alive the whole time, then I haven’t been taken for disposal like some kind of rubbish off the streets but for some other purpose. The ghoul’s comment about "fresh meat" comes to mind and I shudder again and try to move. My limbs jerk spasmodically this time, causing the creature to stop smiling and back away a bit, even as he waves the two handlers in closer.

  "No, no," he whispers in his low voice, "don’t try to move. You’ll be better off if you stay still. We wouldn’t want you to injure yourself." His words are intended to sound comforting, but they only make my skin crawl. I look up at his pinched, gray face and his sightless eyes and see no pity or sympathy there.

  "Bring him," he tells the two handlers. "You can come back for the rest later. It’s not like they’re going anywhere." Chuckling a wheezing laugh at his own joke, the creature turns and moves off as the handlers each grab one of my arms and lift me up. I notice that Weizack is a man with a bit of a paunch and red-rimmed eyes. He wears a scuffed leather jacket and a faded and stained denim shirt. I also notice the butt of a pistol protruding from the side of his belt underneath the jacket.

  His partner is a tall, hulking figure with a broad, flat face. Two short tusks protrude up over his upper lip and his ears are longish and pointed, lying back against his skull. He looks like a goblin or ogre out of some fairy tale, but I realize he’s an ork, one of the metatypes who assumed their true forms when magic returne
d to the world. He is right about one thing; his face is ugly as sin, but it’s nothing like the hideous visage of the creature they work for, the ghoul. I catch the thing’s face out of the corner of my eye as they lift me off the ground, and he almost looks sorry for me. That worries me more than anything I’ve seen so far.

  The two handlers carry me away from the meat-wagon, my feet dragging on the ground, toward a low brick building. The van is parked in an alley alongside the building, and there’s a side door nearby. The weathered brick walls of the building are smeared with years of accumulated graffiti; the signs, scrawls, and symbols meshing together like the secret writing cities use to communicate with those who know how to read it. The symbols are strangely familiar to me, but then I notice something else scrawled in vivid red near the door of the building: "Beware the Tamanous."

  I’m dragged through the door, down a corridor lit by the blue-white light of flickering fluorescent tubes, a glow to make a healthy person look dead, which only emphasizes the ghoul’s pallor. He leads us into a room and turns to Weizack and his partner.

  "Put him up on the table," he says, "so I can get him prepared for delivery."

  Delivery to whom? I wonder, as the men drag me toward a flat, steel table in the middle of the room. Next to it I see a tray of shining, polished instruments: scalpels, needles, tubes, wires, and gleaming hypodermics.

  "It seems like such a waste," the creature sighs softly somewhere behind me. "The parts are always best when they’re fresh."

  When I hear those words I feel the adrenaline rush into my body like a dam breaking. Synapses fire and connect, newfound energy shoots through my nervous system and I find the strength to plant my feet on the floor and shove Weizack away. As he stumbles back with a yell into the tray of instruments, I grab for his gun. Time goes strange and everything seems to be moving in slow motion to me.

  Weizack crashes to the tiled floor along with all of the sharp and shining surgical gear as I flick the safety off on the gun and spin on his partner. I faintly hear the gray creature cry out not to damage me too much as I level the gun at the ork.

  A look of total and utter surprise on Riley’s face makes him look almost innocent and comical for a moment before I fire and the rounds from Weizack’s gun erase his face in a blur of red. He topples back toward the floor with the top of his head blown off.

  Before I can turn toward the ghoul, he is upon me, slamming into my side with surprising speed and strength. His skin is like leather and his eyes are hideous, wide and staring. The smell of him is as overpowering as the charnel smell of the meat-wagon, and he sends us both crashing to the cold tile floor near the steel table. The gun flies from my hand and slides across the tile floor just out of reach. I struggle to get to it, but too late.

  The creature is hideously strong and I am still weak and moving too slow. It grabs me and throws me down onto the floor on my back, pushing the air out of my lungs with a whoosh and sending pain lancing up my spine. A blow to my stomach makes me want to retch, and another upside my head has me seeing stars. I struggle to throw the thing off me as it straddles my legs and strikes at me with its wiry arms, but it is too strong, too heavy.

  The gun is out of my reach and Weizack is stirring and cursing, bleeding from several cuts and gashes the surgical tools have given him. The hot, metallic smell of blood is everywhere in the room, and it seems to drive the creature pinning me into a rage. It smiles and licks its thin lips, revealing a mouthful of sharp teeth and an animal-like tongue.

  I shrink back in fear. Something cold and primal uncoils inside me and seems to take over, a basic instinct. There is a metallic click, and I strike out at one of the wiry gray arms pinning me down. The ghoul arcs back, howling in pain, a scream that scratches against my brain like a monofilament edge parts flesh and bone like water. Blood spurts out in dark gouts from the stump of the ghoul’s arm. I kick the screaming thing off of me and scramble onto my hands and knees toward the gun. The dark, carbon-fiber blade slides silently back into my forearm, shedding the blood and gore from its slick surface as it goes, my skin sealing perfectly over the opening with only the slightest mark to reveal its passage.

  Grabbing the gun from the floor as Weizack begins to get back to his feet, I shoot him in the leg, shattering his thigh bone and leaving a exit wound I could fit my fist through. He goes down yelling "Frag!" over and over again at the top of his lungs as the ghoul also continues to howl and roll on the floor in agony. I have to get out of here before I find out if they’ve got reinforcements nearby. I move over to where Weizack is leaning against the wall and clutching at his leg.

  "Keys," I say as I level the gun at him. He looks for a moment like he’s going to tell me to go slot, but then glances again at the gun I’m holding and reaches into the pocket of his jacket. I grab the key-ring in the shape of a little plastic dragon without taking my eyes off him and then back a few steps away.

  Turning from the carnage in the room, I head out the door, my head still ringing from the ghoul’s strike and my ribs and legs aching. I burst out into the hallway to see a man wearing a pristine white lab coat over his street clothes. He is studying the flat computer pad in his hand. He looks up as I rush out of the room, all bloody and wildeyed, and there is a long instant where we seem to just stand and stare at each other. I raise the gun and shoot him without a second thought and keep moving down the corridor. He drops the computer pad with a clatter and stumbles back from the impact of the round to his chest. The look of surprise is frozen on his face, and he leaves streaks of blood where he slides down the pale gray wall. I have no idea who he is.

  I run down the corridor and out the door to the van parked in the alleyway, still loaded with its macabre cargo of corpses. I yank open the door, jump into the driver’s side, and gun the ignition, body-bags scattering from the meat-wagon’s open rear doors as I peel out of there. A horn blares at me as I swerve onto the road and accelerate away, but there is no sign of pursuit from the charnel house. Only when I’m several blocks away do I notice the blood spattered on my clothes and skin. I look down at my arm where the terrible curved blade emerged, seeing the faint, pale line on my skin near my wrist that is its sheath.

  I didn’t even know it was there.

  3

  Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. " And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. " And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth.

  —Genesis 11:1-9

  It had been a long time since God felled humanity’s last attempt to build a tower to the heavens, but humanity had now toppled heaven from the sky and raised up a new heaven to replace it. A heaven of glittering satellites and low-orbital factories singing their electronic choruses in praise of commerce and free enterprise, looking down on the Earth with their watchful eyes, seeing all.

  In the highest throne of the new heaven sat the Zurich-Orbital, home of the Corporate Court. The Court arbitrated the disputes and laws of the vast, multinational megacorporations straddling the globe and holding the power and prestige once reserved for the nations they had eclipsed. Granted extraterritorial status
by the weakened governments of the world, the megacorps answer to no law but their own, embodied in the form of the satellite orbiting high above the mundane concerns of Earth’s teeming populace. From their heavenly headquarters, the thirteen justices of the Corporate Court pass their divine judgments on the world below and the megacorporations controlling it.

  Justice David Hague of the Corporate Court floated in his small office space on board the Zurich-Orbital like an angel sitting on a cloud, but the Justice—a paid employee of Fuchi Industrial Electronics—was anything but serene. Fidgeting in the loose harness keeping him tethered to one wall of the small room, Hague did his best to simulate pacing in a zero-gravity environment. Floating gently back and forth while looking out the room’s small window at the vast blue sphere of the Earth below, he was alone for the moment with his worries and concerns.

  Despite his unease, Hague was very much the image of an angelic figure. His rosy cheeks and wide blue eyes gave him a boyish air that made him look years younger. He’d cursed the "baby face" in youth, but now that he was past fifty, his youthful looks worked to his advantage. Where most of his colleagues were spending huge sums on cuttingedge treatments to keep them looking young and vital, David Hague could still pass for a man in his thirties. Oh, there was a touch of gray in the golden curls, but his hair was so fair most didn’t notice it anyway. He sighed and thought wistfully of his native Amsterdam again, wishing he were back home, or at least back on Earth.

  He longed to be standing on solid ground and wished the whole matter he’d come here for was over. The trip up to the orbital had been exhausting, as usual. The Z-O operated on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant it was something like four a.m. here, whatever meaning that had for a station in low-earth orbit. Hague’s personal body clock wasn’t far off, and he wished for the hundredth time that the whole thing was over and done with so he could at least get some sleep.