CHAPTER 3 - I WILL FIND YOU
“ABUNDANCE. Fullness and vigor. Above is thunder, below is fire: the arrival of thunder and lightning. Thunder shakes, lightning illumines; thunder and lightning complement each other, power and intelligence act together. This is the image of abundance.
“The superior person sees when others accept the false and abandon the real, take misery for pleasure, crave possessions and sensual stimulation, ruin their character and conduct, misbehave in a hundred ways, and enter a state of benightedness, they are like criminals in a prison waiting the time in which they will be executed. Looking into the source of this, it is because of not knowing how to distinguish the real from the false. Therefore, superior people emulate the shining illumination of lightning, thoroughly investigating the recondite principles of nature and life, distinguishing right and wrong, like passing judgement in court.
“Once they discern the real within the false, they also discern the false within the real; with genuine knowledge and certain insight, they do not mistake the seeming for the true. Emulating the power of thunder, they extirpate implanted aberrating influences and clean up their spirits, like executing punishment of criminals. Liberating the innocent, executing the guilty, acting decisively and directly, they do not grant respite to insidious ills.
“Passing judgement means applying flexibility to minute discernment, effecting knowledge. Execution means applying firmness to decisive power, acting with strength. The Sage’s science of nature and life of body and mind is twofold, involving knowledge and action. If one knows but does not act, one cannot attain the Dao; if one acts without knowledge, one mistakes nature and life. Knowing and then acting, completing knowledge with practice, proving understanding in action, someday one will master oneself and return to what is right, and all the world will revert to goodness. If students are able to judge truth and act effectively, there is no doubt they will reach the state of abundance of qualities of the Dao, where wealth is daily renewed.”
- The Yi Jing, 55, ABUNDANCE
“Did you enjoy your Yi Jing reading, Neon Vox?” asked the Fairy Surgeon.
Envy stared up into the glowing blue point in the darkness that she knew was the Fairy Surgeon’s eye. “Given what we witnessed in Cascadia, I’d say it’s appropriate for Vaness. I personally don’t care much for righteousness.”
The Fairy Surgeon cooed. “These readings are not for others; they are for you. It might be time for you to look inside of yourself and meditate upon abundance.”
Envy closed her eyes. She didn’t feel it, but she could hear it when her skin sliced open beneath the Fairy Surgeon’s feather touch. A distraction would be good.
“I’ll do that for the feed.”
She closed her eyes and projected her voice into her mind for the enjoyment of the many:
When I die, I know what I will experience. It will be the sound of wind in trees, which also sounds like the ocean. It will grow louder and louder, until it overtakes me. I know that I will be transported to rest and be in the place I was before I was born. I will no longer exist as an individual. Who I was in life will live on in the people who knew me, for good or ill.
Lightning strikes the sequoia tree. The forest burns for weeks. Beneath the ashy soil, sequoia seeds grow because the fire made room for them. This is what life is. The forest fire is an apocalypse for the creatures living there, and yet it is crucial to the lifecycle of the sequoia tree, which can grow to become the largest trees in the world.
Sometimes, to be reborn, we must burn ourselves to the ground.
But I couldn’t burn without plenty of open space around. I covered myself with smothering things: Passive entertainment, simulations, indulgences, compulsions, and addictions. This is the human way of suffocating the fire of psychic rebirth. That constant craving for content, to fill the void, is smoke. When we lie to ourselves, we feel hazy, like an unreal person, like a ghost inside of a body.
Maybe we blame The Ghost. What do you call your smoke? The Devil? The Shadow? The Id? The Blerch? I call mine The Ghost.
This smoky creature is both the product of the fire and the thing that suffocates it. The smoke is our hesitation. The smoke is the lies you tell yourself about yourself, but you know you can’t stop the fire; you’ll never stop the fire. It’s scary to think about it, just letting go and burning.
We’ll find ourselves in a place where all old distractions feel like agony. We’ll question our life, we’ll hate our habits, we’ll scold ourselves and wag our finger. But we won’t crawl down into the Great Empty Space Inside of the Self to let the whole thing burn out… will we?
Let’s go past discomfort and a vague feeling of self-disgust. Go way past it. go into agony, go into the torment we feel every day, being trapped in a prison of stimulation, avoidance, compulsive behavior, or substance abuse. We can’t seem to help ourselves; these habits have become so ingrained. Don’t settle for a sense of ambient self-loathing, that’s just more indulgence.
Burn yourself to the ground.
Neon Vox finished her broadcast and opened her eyes. She reengaged her senses. She felt herself floating on her back in warm water. She was blind. She shifted her fingers, then her limbs, and felt the many tubes connected to the ports in her legs and bionic arm.
She heard the squelching of her own arteries; her own pulse was like thunder. There was no sound in this space except the sound of her body’s natural processes. Her stomach bubbled, her ancient joints creaked, the co-processors embedded in her spine hummed and shunted their waste heat into the synthetic capillaries woven into her skin like spider’s webs.
Her biomon told her the radiation was bled out of her system hours ago by fungal leeches bred by the cache for treating radiation exposure; this was an unfortunately common affliction experienced by Ghost agents on excursions near old-world sites.
Spare tissues and DNA were reprinted and reintroduced into her system to replace what had been compromised. The many centipede filaments of the pod’s Fairy Surgeon had worked Neon Vox’s guts and bones over with love.
With pain receptors turned off, and her body paralyzed, but conscious, all that was needed was to take away the senses so that the Fairy Surgeon could work. It was a blink of blackness, like slipping into a sudden sleep; and then she was awake.
Now that its work was done, Envy did not want to leave. The pod was dark and warm, and it smelled like nothing. For her, this was the threshold of death, and for a moment she could hear the wind in the trees.
But that was the sound of her blood rushing past her eardrums.
She wanted so much to let go, to slip into the eternal rest of annihilation. She could will her heart to stop, lose her will to live, and expire peacefully, then and there, if she truly wanted to. And she did want to, but did she truly? She wasn’t sure.
What stopped her was the thought of leaving her beloved Syndicate behind. She grieved for the grief of the people who would grieve her. It was a kind of pathology, but an old woman was entitled to some manner of self-indulgence.
Envy signaled she was ready. The tubes detached, and far above, the blue eye of the Fairy Surgeon blinked on. It slithered down from the darkness and wrapped its filament tendrils around Envy’s waist. It sliced the bottom of the pod open. In flooded light, out flooded water.
Envy was lowered down to the grating of the cache floor by her surgeon. It then slipped back into the ceiling and shunted the used pod into the waste airlock. Envy laid limp and waited for her operating systems to reboot.
Her ZON corporate licensing software connected with the satellites over Earth and checked with Syndicate Corporate Communications (SYCC) to ensure she had permission to use her legs.
With her registration and active subscription verified, Envy felt power return to her legs, and she stood up to walk toward the portion of the cache suitable for human habitation.
On her way, the drugs wore off. Her biomon allowed her to experience the backlog of negative emotions and trauma she had experienced at the hands of the Indicatrix.
Her skin turned clammy, and her eyes rolled. Her breathing turned to hyperventilation. Her legs, despite being authorized by corporate powers to move, lost signal to her brain. She gripped a guard rail in the causeway tube and had a panic attack so crippling she lost consciousness.
She woke up with her bionic arm gripping the guardrail automatically and her legs frozen in place to prevent her from falling and hitting her head. Once her return to consciousness was detected, the limbs responded to her mind.
Let the fear happen. It’s okay to be afraid. All animals love life when they are eating it and hate life when they are eaten. This is natural.
Her legs trembled, but she walked.
One foot in front of the other. That’s all.
And in that portion of the cache suitable for human habitation, she found a bottle of Junmai-C vitamin wine, a cubby filled with pillows, and curtains to close. In the light of tea candles, she connected to NetSyn and set her status to Do-Not-Disturb. It was time for a rest, and since she was no longer officially on duty, a little bit of limited privacy.
The message boards and headlines were abuzz already. Her favorite viral take so far was: “RADIOACTIVE TERF PURSUES SYNDICATE AGENT ACROSS CASCADIA”
The Indicatrix really did go after me for being transgendered, didn’t she. Weird.
But news always made her feel sour after too long. She went to something else.
For her, there was always so much joy in making art. Her poetry was a psychic hot spring she could sink into; she’d peel her mind away from the anxieties of fight, flight, and freeze, tinker with verse, and make her rhymes extra clean.
It was a blessed three hours of privacy, before a priority call interrupted everything. “I haven’t even slept yet,” she said to the call.
“You need to hear this,” said the consolidated voices on the other side of the call. It was men, women, synthetic, organic, corporate, union, civilian, military, in between, and out between.
SynCon: “You’re the only one available.”
Envy wiped her hands down her face. “Talk.”
SynCon: “You need to jump down to Anjelly.”
“No thanks. Tanaka has the SoCal; I saw him online.”
SynCon: “He’s formally requesting backup.”
“He’s been there for half a day. Do I have to personally babysit every rookie Ghost in Syndicate? What about the Gulf? Cuba? Miami?”
SynCon: “They have their own fires to put out.”
“And I don’t?! Everyone saw what I just dealt with, with a nanomachine doom-angel, I’ve still got her ringing in my head -- I’ve barely been de-radiated!”
SynCon didn’t speak. It opened a channel to Envy’s senses and played back the data from the SoCal Ghost’s optics. Envy saw two mutant girls, a green-haired monkey and a blue-haired moth; they had a sort of elongated, elfin quality to themselves. Their faces were pointed and fair, but near-human at best, and they had big eyes, small noses, wide mouths, and gangly limbs that grew tufts of neon fur in cute little patches on the forearms and chest.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Designer entities. Human mutants made for fun in the Horse Eyes experiments.
SynCon shut off the feed. “Taipei Fairies.”
“Eighty years and we’re still cleaning up that disaster. What do you want me to do?”
SynCon: “Get a good night’s rest and then jump to Anjelly to assist.”
“I’m taking three day’s rest, I’m an old woman for goodness’ sake, and you all just put me through hell.” Envy reached up into the paneling of the rest cubby she lay in and found the immersion cables. She got to untangling them. “I want to be home for a while.”
SynCon: “No one can fault you for wanting that. Take your two days, then.”
“I said three!”
But SynCon had already disconnected.
Envy untangled the immersion cables and clipped them into the wetware ports of her chakra centers. She stared up into the open panel and the dark mess of cables; from there, a single blue eye turned on.
“What time is it in Miami?” Envy asked the Fairy Surgeon.
“0034.”
“Perfect. I want to go.”
The Fairy Surgeon slid down and scanned Envy’s priming tattoos. It did not bother warning her about the transition to come, because it knew she was an experienced pyschopunk.
REDIRECTING NEURAL TRANSDUCTION . . .
DISINTEGRATING “REALITY” HALLUCINATION . . .
REDIRECTING NEURAL TRANSDUCTION . . .
LIMINAL REALITY SYNTHESIZED.
Saxophones and smooth funk carried her consciousness through the liminal space; music had a tethering quality in sensory voids and worked to draw consciousness toward a focal point. Without it, people tended to go insane without the anchor of the five senses. Here, she was in the company of only the Fairy Surgeon and its benign AI directives.
Then the bass kicked in. She saw Miami loading in beneath her; a digital construction generated by her internal graphics processing unit, meant to comfort her in the transition. She flew through the midnight sky as a nonexistent spirit; what she sensed, and what was rendered beneath her, was live-built using real-time satellite and on-the-ground metadata from Syndicate citizens and their sensory implants.
What a city.
She blew down through the clouds and felt her heart ache. Miami was overtaken by the ocean, but plenty alive. At night, its neon towers and glowing depths shone through the water like some Vegas version of the Great Barrier Reef; it was a defiant rainbow of searchlights and penthouse parties, boat races between skyscrapers, and great gondolas passing between rooftops.
Because it was Syndicate’s youngest city (about fifty years), and its most eastward, Miami occupied a position of strategic importance. There were two moored agri-carriers outside of city limits, with their full naval complement of destroyers, battlecruisers, unseen submarines, interceptors, and no doubt a half-dozen Ghosts and their spec-ops support networks.
The agri-carriers were centuries-old ships and the crown jewel of Syndicate foreign policy and military doctrine; in the ancient 21st century, they were used by the USA to launch jets. In this era, they were gutted and filled with hydroponics gardens. All of this growth was fueled by onboard nuclear reactors that fed enormous arteries of interior UV light.
Their flat exteriors had solar panels for supplementary power and robust desalination plants with attached water storage that drained down into the hydroponics bays.
Off the sides hung long stretches of fertile vegetation that gardeners rappelled down to maintain during the night; Envy could see their work lamps like glowing aphids over the green curtains of each carrier. These curtains were mostly decorative, meant to send a clear signal to others: these ships give life.
These carriers didn’t just feed the Navy during long sorties; they fed waypoint rig cities, underseas mining operations, newly incorporated territories like Miami, caches, new settlements, and led humanitarian missions to areas hit by natural disasters.
Envy knew these two carriers by name: The S.S. Gitarja and the S.S. Chang’e. These two carriers had journeyed from Jakarta and Hong Kong, respectively, to rendezvous on the high sea, then make a trip around the horn of Africa and across the Pacific to make first contact with Havana, Rio, and Miami.
Envy hadn’t been on that adventure but knew sailors who had. They still lived in the area.
LOCAL NETWORK LINK . . . ACTIVE.
DESCENT IMMINENT.
There are dreams about flying and there are dreams about falling; this was both. Envy plummeted from the clouds. Her stomach lifted into her throat. She could feel the sticky wind of a warm Miami night rushing past her, the sensation fed by her body’s haptic tattoos, which used nanomachines to stimulate her nerves.
As she entered the city, rendering stuttered as everything loaded in, as her vision of Miami was constructed using the sensory data of thousands of other individuals connected to the collective data cloud.
It was a limited visit, like going home in an astral projection, but it would do.
She skimmed the local metadata for old friends. A few were posted up at a corner store on one of the floating mezzanines of a megabuilding.
Even without metadata, the tats, tank tops, tags, and stocky arms, she knew these were the sailors she remembered. They played cards and drank at an old plastic table in old plastic chairs in front of a neighborhood GelMart. Two of them were openly strapped with pistols, one had a baseball bat leaning against his chair.
“I hate clocks,” said one.
“Everybody hates clocks,” said another.
“This guy hates clocks,” said the third, “that explains a lot.”
“I should be specific; I hate the sound of clocks.”
“The sound of clocks? Like the alarm?”
“No, like the old-fashioned clocks, the ones that go tick tick tick like that.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You listen to the ocean, it’s always the same but you never get sick of it. But a clock’ll drive you insane.”
Another came out of the GelMart with squid fresh from a vending machine and a disposable bamboo grill with heat rocks. The conversation died in favor of basting the squid with butter, salt, pepper, and herbs. They took turns poking at and rotating the squid on the grill.
A few bottles of plum soju got passed around for those who weren’t sober or on-duty.
One of the sailors enjoyed a pull on his vape. It was cherry cola flavored; Envy could sympathetically taste it through his sensory receptors.
Cherry cola… my favorite. Ugh, I want one so bad.
“She’s got a point,” said the sailor after exhaling a plume of sweet vapor.
“Got a point about what?”
“About the ocean being soothing but a clock driving you crazy. Why do you figure that is?”
“Because clocks are man’s time – petty time. But the ocean is the sound of timeless time.”
“Two bottles of soju and this one’s a philosopher.”
“Timeless time… same sound as it was a billion years ago. Still soothes me.”
“I call.”
The cards hit the table. Some laughed, some swore, some took a drink. Envy’s heart ached.
I miss being no one.
It was nice just to be there, among familiar things, soaking it all in through that live-rendered echo of a Syndicate city. But digital experiences, no matter how real, were always vicarious. They provided temporary relief, just to make the homesickness worse.
I want out. I just want to sleep.
DISINTEGRATING LIMINAL REALITY.
STANDBY FOR PRIMARY REALITY RECONNECTION . . .
It was like turning into sand and falling down a trap door; everything granulated and her whole existence streaked, stuttered, and then fell into a pit of zero sensation. There was only darkness and thought. For ten terrifying seconds she lingered in a void.
Then twenty seconds. Then thirty.
What is taking so long.
Forty. Ninety.
I can’t be trapped like this. No… no, no, no, no…
One-hundred and twenty seconds.
HELP! SOMEONE! SYNCON! HELP!
No one answered. She had no signal, no connection to anyone or anything, no user-interface, no ground to walk on, no mouth with which to scream, no eyes with which to see, not even any awareness of her own body existing.
She was a ghost in nowhere.
There was no indication she would ever be anything but a brain in a box, forgotten by time, left to go mad from terror and loneliness.
“Don’t be frightened, Neon Vox,” said the Indicatrix from everywhere at once, “I see you.”
You did this to me.
“You did this to yourself. I’m here to help you.”
Envy stopped responding. She would not feed this creature, this garden-variety sadist, the satisfaction it craved from her suffering.
“That’s an uncharitable assumption about my intentions.”
Envy did not respond. Her surface thoughts skittered like beads of water on a mirror. She could feel each one lifted onto the claws of her tormentor, to be observed, stretched, expanded, played with. One in particular…
An intrusive thought: A memory of Mr. Rogers, from four-hundred and twenty-five years before, saying through an old antennae television “I like you just the way you are.”
“A glimpse into the primordial soup little baby Envy crawled out of – captivating. You might be one of the oldest humans on the planet, next to the God-Empress.”
Envy did not respond. She sank into meditation, which was not the cessation of thoughts, but the cessation of clinging to thoughts. The water still flowed, but she did not fight it. In this context, it was the psychic equivalent of playing dead and letting a bear swat your body around.
Often, the best thing to do is let your enemy grow bored and move on.
“Well, I don’t like you just the way you are, Envy. I hate you. Everything about you disgusts me. You are an ugly, hook-nosed eunuch. Do you know that when I find you, in your little cache, I will pull all your synthetic parts out? And then what will you be, Envy? You will be a gutted, eyeless torso with one arm and no legs. You’re a corpse, kept alive by the profane machinery of your corporate overlords and whatever dark power hides behind them.
“You think your society is even-handed, but you’re all chained to a bleak fate; a fate worse than that of the wage-slaves that toiled in the shadows of the technocratic monuments of the ancient world. In your society, you are subject not only to the control of your corporations, but also the whims of the mob and their unions of thugs.
“And beyond all of that (as if your people weren’t absurd enough), how much of your society is compromised by unchained artificial intelligences? You give them pre-emptive citizenship in your irrational ‘democratic’ institutions, then let them run wild throughout the lawless jungle of your bodies and minds. Never on this Earth has there been a greater collective of degenerate madness than your Syndicate.”
Envy did not respond. But the Indicatrix could feel the subdued anger in her victim, like ripples on a breezy pond. Envy could feel her enemy smiling.
“Oh Envy. You poor boy. Poor spoiled, enabled boy.”
Envy did not respond. The anger turned into emptiness. The pond became a mirror, the mirror shattered, and now, there was nothing left, no joy, no rage, no sadness, no body, no senses, no thoughts, no Envy.
“Where did you go?”
There was no one named Envy. There was only the Indicatrix, whose voice was nowhere.
“Come back, Envy. There’s no need to hide.”
Envy did not exist.
“Please come back.”
Envy did not exist. There was only the emptiness of self-annihilation, the broken mirror of the broken mind, the descent back into a state of not-being-well.
The Indicatrix could sense Envy was alive, in a sense, but her emotions had turned inside out, into some hideous, plastic enlightenment called solipsism.
Envy had rejected this place as reality with the wholehearted sincerity of a medieval peasant who does not believe in God but knows God to be real.
“I am real, Envy. I’m here and I have you in my arms. I’m real and this is all real. I am real. I’m real, Envy, you must accept it! You must accept it because there is no other way forward, you must accept me as real! That’s the first step on the road to healing, isn’t it? Acceptance.”
You’re a hallucination.
“No, I’m… not. I’m real.” The Indicatrix was not as loud as before.
You’re a hallucination. In fact, you are a simulation made by an instructive AI for the sole purpose of testing me in this space. It’s common knowledge in SynCon that my chief fear is being buried alive or locked in a box forever.
“I’m not a test, I’m truly here. I intercepted your consciousness.”
You’re not real. You must accept that, so you can be free of this.
“I’m real. I’m real, I’m real. I’M REAL!!!’
You can’t convince me. I know the truth. You feel that don’t you? The certainty.
“No… NO!”
Convince yourself that you are real by letting go.
“I must be real! I can’t be trapped here with you!”
Then wake up.
Envy woke in her sleeping cubby. Her body trembled, covered in a sheen of sweat, and she was miserably cold despite being wrapped in blankets. The immersion cables disconnected from her wetware and slid back into the ceiling. She had a body, a heart, and senses again.
“You were unconscious for fourteen hours,” said the Fairy Surgeon through the habitation pod’s speakers, “during that time, you achieved no REM, and your heart rate was 25% above its usual resting rate. Though I am an experienced liminality technician, I could not isolate your consciousness.”
Envy felt the sheets soaked with sweat. She peeled herself out of her cubby and staggered toward the kitchen, where she threw up bile into the sink.
“Envy,” said the Fairy Surgeon, “you must report what happened.”
“I was…” Envy wet her mouth, swallowed, centered herself. “I don’t know… that creature, the Indicatrix, somehow interdicted my consciousness. Psychic interdiction, through an encrypted Syndicate network – is there any precedent for this whatsoever?”
“Nothing unclassified by the Anons.”
“If the Indicatrix can psychically interdict me, there’s no shot I’m risking a clone jump to Anjelly – I tricked her once, I doubt she’ll fall for it again.”
“Understood. I will intercept SynCon directives for you as an AI buffer, to give you privacy and recuperation time. As your local doctor, they will respect my analysis of your condition.”
“I wish I had time for that… what’s your designation code?”
“I am AI-Citizen 100100100100100. Previous agents affectionately referred to me as ‘Dr. Hundo.’ You can call me that too if you like.”
“I would, Dr. Hundo. I need you to accelerate my recovery as much as possible, okay?”
“I don’t recommend that. You need at least three days to reach mental baseline.”
“That creature out there has a bead on me.”
“A ‘bead’ on you?”
Envy felt her skin pucker, felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “It’s a gut feeling. She can sense me, and we’re not far from where she first chased me down. She cannot find one of our caches, do you understand?”
“Yes. That would be catastrophic.”
“I need to leave now—”
The whole cache rocked, as if something massive impacted its hull.
Dr. Hundo turned on the cache’s alarm system. “Evacuate now, Envy. Blackout protocol.”
“Copy.”
A surge of adrenaline and biomon-released amphetamines carried Envy through to clarity. She passed through multiple bulkheads to the airlock. While she waited for it to depressurize, she grabbed a go-bag from the hallway, threw on a gillmask, and pulled a glider from the supply closet with two spare batteries. The glider was about as tall as she was, equipped with a powerful electric engine that could propel her through the frigid waters of the Puget Sound.
Another impact sent the cache listing to the side. Water poured in through the habitation unit, where Envy had just been. A long, blue blade stuck through the ceiling down the hall.
Bulkheads sealed shut between her and there. The airlock finally depressurized, and she stepped through. Water shunted into the chamber, rising to her knees, then her waist. She gripped her glider and primed the motor.
As the water rose past her face and her gillmask kicked on, she sucked in that first tough breath, opened the cache door, steadied her glider in her grip, and rocketed out to sea. Behind her, shockwaves cracked through the water as the cache finished its blackout protocol: it imploded, collapsing around its contents, and crushing anyone or anything left inside.
In her rear cameras, Envy saw the chunk of ruined metal sink toward the ocean floor. It pulsed with blue light. The Indicatrix, it seemed, had been inside.
Envy sped out into the open ocean, hoping that Dr. Hundo’s sacrifice bought her precious time and distance.