The Electric Church

Book 1: Avery Cates

by Jeff Somers

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Time is your curse. Lack of time. Everything requires time, and you have so little. This leads me to the fundamental question the Electric Church poses: How can you be saved when you have no time?



Avery Cates is a very bad man. Some might call him a criminal. He might even be a killer-for the right price. But right now, Avery Cates is scared. He's up against the Monks-cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and a small arsenal of advanced weaponry. Their mission is to convert anyone and everyone to the Electric Church. But there is just one snag: Conversion means death.

Release date: September 25, 2007

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

 

1 The title does not have any apparent meaning, and no explanation has ever been publicly offered by the Church.
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2 Squalor consistently refers to humans who have not joined the Electric Church as “insects.” The image resurfaces throughout the work, although it is interesting that Squalor also refers to himself in this manner, usually in the same sentence.
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3 Squalor remains an unknown quantity. Prior to Unification he was a student of some promise, earning advanced degrees in biology and computer science. After the turmoil of Unification, he disappeared from public records for a decade, emerging only after having gone through his own process of cyborg conversion—in short, becoming a Monk—and founding the Church.
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4 There is a sense of contempt for biology throughout the Codex and other Church writings, accompanied by a reverence for technology. The physical body produced by evolution is often referred to in terms of disposability and corruption (i.e. rot, decomposition, impermanence) whereas technology—obviously represented by the Monks’ artificial bodies—is presented as lasting forever. Monks will often stress the eternal nature of their bodies when accosting citizens in the streets.
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5 Throughout the Codex there are many of these binary statements, pairs of options and conditions that Squalor compares, resulting in a very simple and compelling view of the universe—there is good and bad, eternity and damnation, sin and industry.
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6 The Electric Church was granted Recognition as a legal religion, protected under standing order 778, eight years ago.
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7 Throughout the Codex, Squalor shifts from venerating God as the creator and the architect to dismissing God as a fantasy to be ignored, often within the same page or even the same paragraph.
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8 Here is the fundamental concept of the Electric Church: The idea that mankind’s eventual salvation is possible only through our mastery of technological and scientific knowledge. Specifically, the Church preaches that only through centuries, even epochs of meditation and study can salvation be attained—the necessary lifespan being supplied by the cyborg bodies Squalor has designed and built, as well as the process he has devised for transferring a human brain into one.
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9 This is a disturbing passage to many, and is often quoted by those who claim the Church has engaged in violence against innocent citizens who do not voluntarily join or listen to preaching. It should be noted that there is not a single documented complaint against the Church filed by a reliable citizen of standing, and that all complaints from less reliable citizens have been retracted over time.
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10 This text is often quoted at length by Monks when preaching to an individual. It has appeared in several transcripts of SSF surveillance of Electric Church assets.
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11 It is interesting to note that while the impossibility of “attaining” salvation in our normal lifespans is stressed in the Codex, at no point is any mechanism or procedure for attaining salvation after conversion ever outlined. The clear implication is that conversion into a Monk is the necessary first step—in order to attain the time needed—but beyond that there is no hint as to what a Monk should be doing with eternity. The assumption must be that instructions will follow.
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12 This passage appears several times throughout the Codex, reproduced exactly.
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13 Elsewhere in the Codex the idea that only a small number of “souls” are constantly being recycled into new physical bodies is expanded, with lengthy contemplations on the mathematics of reincarnation (explaining, somewhat inconclusively, how a limited number of souls inhabits a population that has—except for the brief period before and after Unifi-cation—grown steadily over the years) and the lack of past-life memories.
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14 Squalor never actually defines what this “singularity” he experienced was, though it is widely believed to be a reference to his own conversion into a cyborg, which (see below) does not seem to have been an experience he expected to survive.
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15 Although there have been exceptions, most studies done on Church recruitment (mainly using SSF field reports as source material) show that the Church targets the criminal class almost exclusively. Citizens that would be termed “upper class” or at the very least legally employed are all but ignored by the Monks. In urban centers, where the Monks are concentrated and numerous, they remain almost exclusively in the plentiful “reconstruction zones” left over from the Unification Riots—downtown Manhattan, for example. Most SSF officers consider the Monks’ activities amongst the petty criminals and marginal citizens of these areas to be of no concern, or even, in some cases, a benefit to the System in that they remove undesirable elements from these areas. No Monk has ever been charged with a crime postconversion.
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16 It is curious that Squalor here berates readers for “imagining” their impact on the world, and yet he clearly states that he is the “patient zero” of the Electric Church’s “singularity.” Although it can be assumed that if you have been chosen by God to perform a task, the rules no longer apply to you.
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17 Prior to his disappearance, apparent suicide attempt, and reappearance as head of the Electric Church, Dennis Squalor in fact worked for the Joint Council in the first years after Unification. Records are under seal, and are scarce in any event due to the frequent disruptions suffered post-Unification before the establishment of the System Security Force, but his name can be found on several disbursement orders from the first and second Council sessions. The nature of the work he did for the Joint Council is not known, though considering his training it would likely have been scientific in nature.
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18 Details are scant, but there is some evidence that Squalor’s suicide attempt was actually conducted by performing his cyborg-conversion technique on himself. It is interesting that he apparently regarded the chance of a successful conversion to be so low as to be virtual suicide.
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19 Rumors persist that not all conversions to the Electric Church are voluntary, although every conversion is well-documented in accordance with System Law, and is accompanied by a signed statement of intent from each convert, including brainwave scan to establish identity. No further investigation has ever been conducted into a conversion, however, because converts are usually people of no family and few means.
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20 The design of the Church’s cyborg “avatars” as they refer to them does not include any sort of sleep-simulation. Current scientific opinion is that the human brain requires some sort of sleep cycle. The Electric Church maintains that their technology removes the need for sleep, and that its adherents suffer no ill effects. It must be noted that no member of the Church has, to date, ever been diagnosed with or complained of a sleep-deprivation-related illness.
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21 The Electric Church has often stated publicly that it condemns all violence and compulsion, and that all converts are free to leave the Church and live out their immortal existences in any way they wish. No discussion of what immortal cyborgs are to do in society outside the Church is offered, however. No organizations exist to guide or assist former Monks, mainly because there are no former Monks. In the entire history of the Church, there is not one record of a convert leaving the Church.
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22 There is some evidence (see SSF Field Report 34, Case Reference A3764) that Squalor experienced some terrible physical trauma shortly before founding the Church. Medical records are scant (Health Program microchips had not been universally introduced at the time, and it was still possible to approach a local Emergency Room service without an implanted chip) and if true, he almost certainly used a pseudonym, so positive identification is not possible.
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23 This is a small section of a lengthy section of the Codex that appears at the end, without preamble or introduction. It appears to be in the tradition of Apocalyptical Literature and is a rambling account that does not make obvious real-life sense. Various interpretations have been offered, but the accepted view is that Squalor was deranged at the time of writing and that these fevered images mean nothing.
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24 It is interesting to note that Squalor, a man who embraces the near-total conversion of the biological body to technology, constructs this story as one wherein humans are menaced by nature in the form of “wild” animals.
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25 It may be a meaningless coincidence, but it has been noted that since founding the Electric Church and appearing in public, Squalor has always appeared in public wearing sunglasses that cover his eyes completely, leading to speculation that he is, indeed, blind.
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PROLOGUE

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE IN

THE SYSTEM OF FEDERATED NATIONS

01001

“You screwed up, Mr. Cates.”

I was on the East Side of Old New York, the original island. A dive, no roof, the worst gin I’d ever had too much of and no familiar faces around me. It was cold, and I felt feverish, sweaty—I felt like shit and I was getting worse with every cup of the dirty liquor I bought with my dwindling yen. I wasn’t sure what they made it from—paint thinner was my best guess—but it was terrible.

Immediately, the man on my right and the grizzled, one-eyed woman on my left stood up with their cups and walked away. No one else at the table even looked at me. If I got murdered sitting here they’d just roll me onto the floor and forget about me. I had no people here. It wasn’t my part of the city.

I knew the voice, though. I tightened my grip on my own cup and quickly scanned the place without turning my head. The place was packed, just like every other illegal gin joint in New York. It was just the ground floor of a ruined building, all tattered gray concrete and broken rebar, ancient graffiti and bloodstains. Next week it would be abandoned again, dusty and shadowed, and the week after that it would be another bar, serving liquor made from rubber tires or ground glass or some other nightmare. The walls all around ended in a ragged tear, the entire second floor of the building gone, torn away by riots and time and several hundred hover displacements as System Cops hunted people like me through the streets. It was filled with scavenged tables and chairs, a crazy collection of mismatched furniture and unhappy people.

“You fucked up, Mr. Cates,” the voice emphasized, and a hand fell on my shoulder.

I imagined I could feel the blade right behind me. I’d seen enough barroom executions to know the drill—guy walks up behind you, says something, one hand on your shoulder to get leverage and then a knife in the back, angled up, the victim half-paralyzed and very little blood. It wasn’t a bad move, normally—except for the little speech, which was just a waste of advantage. My eyes jumped from a pile of rocks to a pack of slope-shouldered shitkickers milling about the edges of the place to a rusted steel table with two flat metal planks welded to the legs for seats set right against the far wall. It looked sturdy enough.

Heart pounding, I took a deep breath and glanced at the security I could see. I figured it would take them about twenty seconds to get to me. I’d killed people in less time.

The bullshit, it was endless. I hadn’t had a very good night and was in no mood to watch it get worse. I didn’t move right away—assholes twitched, assholes always thought it was harder to hit a moving target and they thrashed around constantly. I knew better. I wasn’t the oldest person in the room for nothing. With his heavy hand on my shoulder, gripping tightly, trying to be intimidating, I took a few seconds to take in my surroundings.

I saw it all—every face, every position, every table, chair, or pile of rubble they were sitting on. I saw the twitchy augmented security—illegal muscles with its own alien IQ layered all over their bodies—making sure no one got crazy. I saw the red-eyed beggars eager to drain the dregs from an abandoned cup. I saw it all and fixed it in my mind, even the Monks. The Monks with their creepy plastic faces and mirrored glasses were always in these places. They were supposed to be immortal—humans who’d signed up to have their brains placed in advanced cyborg bodies, in order to pray for eternity or some such shit, and by the looks of them they believed it. Three of them were working the tables, scanning faces and talking to people about death and sin and forever.

I dismissed them; I’d heard of people messing with the Tin Men and finding out they were dangerous, vague stories of a guy who knew a guy who’d tried to rob a Monk in a dark alley and lost his arm for his trouble, or stories of people going to sleep after a bender and waking up Monked against their will the next morning—there was so much bullshit, you didn’t know what to believe, and I didn’t have time to figure it out now. I didn’t know whether to believe their spiel about “salvation through eternity” either. I figured it was best to just give them a wide berth and hope they never scanned my face.

I had the layout fixed in a moment: thirteen tables, approximately three hundred people crowded into the space, one narrow, inconvenient exit guarded by security. Probably a hidden escape-hole for the proprietors, too. The security guys weren’t much better than the customers, skillwise. One on one I wouldn’t have much trouble with them, but with a crowd and narrow doorways, they’d be trouble enough.

This was why I was still alive. Most people in my line of business, they just blazed away—all muscle and ammo. No research. No patience—they lived and died by their reflexes. Especially if their reflexes were augmented with black-market gene splices.

Me, I was tired. I was old school. I liked to use my brain a little.

I shifted to the left just a tick, brought the cup up, and splashed gin into the big guy’s eyes, and knew I’d hit the mark from the sudden squeak of surprise. I spun left and his knife flashed into the empty space in front of him. I slapped out my hand and took him by the wrist, firmly, and stood up, rolling his arm behind him as I moved, something popping loudly in his shoulder as he dropped the blade with a clatter onto the floor. I kicked at it and it disappeared, most likely plucked cleanly off the floor as it skidded by some enterprising criminal. From the look of his expensive clothes, my admirer either was rich, worked for someone rich, or was a System Security Force officer. But System Pigs didn’t need to hire guys to arrange murders; they just showed up, pinched you, and shot you in the head in some deserted alleyway, usually after emptying your pockets. This guy, from what I remembered when he’d hired me a few days before, didn’t talk rich. He was just a middleman who’d come up in the world.

Now I had leverage, and I used it to slam him face-first onto the table. No one else sitting around me had moved. I leaned down, smothering him, and chanced a look up. Security was just starting for me, a little slow. Fuckheads. You couldn’t find good help these days. I thought, I could kill this bastard six times before you made it to me, assholes. Keeping my eyes on security, I put my mouth into his ear.

“You owe me fifteen thousand yen, motherfucker.”

He was having a lot of trouble breathing, with my weight on top of him and his arm nearly broken. “You . . . fucked . . . up . . .” he gasped.

I twisted his arm a little more, and he finally made some real noise, a strangled cry that dissolved into a gurgling moan. “What was that?”

“They found her . . . hanging from a . . . fire escape . . . goddamn . . . goddammit . . .”

I felt pretty confident that I had this guy under control, so I looked up again. Security was still a few tables away, sauntering toward us, not hurrying. They were used to sodden lumps of shit causing a ruckus. I’d overestimated them, no doubt, and dismissed them from my worries.

“My employer . . .” he stuttered out, “will not . . . be happy . . .”

My sense of outrage turned my vision red for a moment. This asshole owed me fifteen thousand yen, had tried to shiv me in the goddamn back, and now he’s complaining to me? I tightened my grip on his wrist and pushed with all my might, and the bastard finally screamed as a sharp cracking sound rewarded my efforts.

“You lied to me,” I hissed. “Or you’re incompetent. The subject was not alone. You said nothing about professional protection—moonlighting SSF, a fucking cop she looked like, and a lot of goddamn trouble.” I twisted his arm again, savagely. “And there was a child, you shithead. In the room.”

I looked up. Security had split up, coming around the tables from either side, looking to flank me.

Amazingly, the big guy started to shudder, and I realized he was laughing, whether from reaction or shock or some bizarre sense of humor, I didn’t know. My eyes swept the table, black and tan and white faces, all more interested in their gin than in my little drama—a drama they’d seen, a drama they’d acted in. Boring stuff.

The big guy had suddenly found his voice, slurry and close to unconscious as it was. “A child?” he gasped. “Who gives a shit, a child? You’re hired to eliminate someone, you do it. A child? Fuck, you kill that piece of shit, too.”

I wanted to hurt him more, I wanted to make him feel it. I trembled with the urge to do him violence. But I could see, in my peripheral vision, that security had arrived and were sneaking their way around the table, coming at me from the left and right. I let out an explosive breath, released the big guy, and in one practiced motion reached across my body into my coat and came up with a gun in each hand, each pointed at one twitchy musclebound asshole. Security paused, looking at each other across me. No one at the table moved, or even seemed to be paying attention. The big guy looked to have finally passed out.

“We don’t give a shit,” one of the security guys said with the mushy accent of oft-broken teeth. “Just take it outside.”

I nodded. I was civilized. I didn’t kill children and I did not shoot men whose only crime was doing their job. Not unless I had to. “I’m leaving. No trouble.”

Even shitheads respected you if you played by the rules.

One of them swept an arm toward the door, inviting me to take my shit elsewhere. I was full of terrible gin eating away at my insides, and I was a sweating, unwashed mess. I’d killed someone just a few hours ago, the wrong person, worth exactly zero yen to me, and the mark I had been hired to kill, and the kid, would both likely be dead tomorrow when the contract went out to someone else, some other Gunner with less scruple. Some kid who had never known anything but the System, nothing but a unified world and the Joint Council that ran it. And the cops—the Crushers who walked the streets and kept order, more or less, and the officers, the System Pigs, who cracked heads and shook us all down, who’d grown rich off us like fucking bedbugs sucking for all they were worth. Someone who’d never known anything better was possible.

I took one step backward, slowly, bringing my arms in and holding both guns ready just in case. As if movement had triggered something, a sudden roar filled the air, and I froze.

“Hover displacement!” someone shouted.

“Pigs!” someone else added helpfully, and the whole place was chaos. Everyone leaped up and made for the exit, the fucking morons. I was forgotten. I found myself standing there with guns drawn while everyone in the place pushed past me. For a moment I was frozen in shock, but when the cops kicked on the floods and the whole space filled with harsh, white light, I found my legs. I moved against the current and rolled under one of the tables.

This sort of shit usually didn’t happen—the illegal bars were so common, and the Crushers liked making a little extra money in bribes from what they saw as a victimless crime. When enough was enough and time came to shut things down, everyone knew it was happening and the cops ended up raiding an empty place, confiscating a lot of stale booze, and smashing up some burned-out still; meanwhile a new place opened up in some other toothless shell of a building. The circle of life in the System of Federated Nations.

A hover meant officers, real police. This was a step up, this meant someone in the place was wanted. The Crushers in their sloppy uniforms you knew by name, they cracked some heads but were generally all right, just doing their job—and maybe, on good days, you could even admit they did a necessary job, keeping us jobless wonders from tearing each other apart. But the System Pigs, they were a step up, the elite. They were more dangerous, greedier, and they didn’t crack heads. They put bullets in them.

I reholstered the automatics and drew my lucky gun, made by the Roon Corporation out in California, a modified model 87a (illegal because it was fully automatic, unregistered, and lacking DNA scan locks). Expensive, with action like silk. The exit, as expected, was blocked by the crush of assholes trying to escape. In the bright light of the hover, they were crisp, sharply defined, a mass of desperation. I racked a bullet into the chamber and ran a dry tongue along my lips, my stomach feeling like it was on fire, my head aching. I was old. I’d been old for years.

“Attention!” came the booming metallic voice of the hover’s PA. “This is Captain Jack Hallier of the System Security Force! Stand still and submit to authorized scanning and identification procedure!”

That was formal bullshit. The SSF didn’t give a shit if you submitted or not. They usually preferred you didn’t. The Crushers you could reason with, strike a deal—they were human, even if they carried a badge. The Pigs, though—fuck, they weren’t human.

On cue, I saw a dozen boots drop from above and hit the floor, swirling, headache-inducing patterns on them, Stormers in Obfuscation Kit. No proper SSF raid happened without Stormers in their ObFu, practically invisible when they stood still. From my temporary shelter I looked around, and did a double take: To my left, hiding under their own table, were three Monks. They each turned to look at me with their terrible mask faces, and then looked away. I blinked, twisted around, and began crawling away from the exit, toward the far wall, hands and knees, old-fashioned. Behind me, bullets started flying.

I just kept crawling. I’d killed twenty-six people. I wasn’t going to allow myself to be picked up in some random grab. When I made it to the wall I didn’t waste time: I jumped up, climbed up on the table I’d spied earlier, and threw myself over the wall, landing hard on the other side, my head bouncing on the broken pavement. Lying in the damp shadows, head ringing, I elected to just stay where I was for a moment. Above me, I could see the ass end of the SSF hover floating. In a way, it was beautiful, a rectangle of metal, blurred by displacement, lights blasting through the evening, Stormer tether lines snaking out of it like tentacles, all of it like some horrible, bloated insect.

A pulse of panic shot through me and I blinked, my head clearing. I forced myself up, checked my weapon, and limped for the deepest shadows a few steps away, a painful hitch in my back making me limp a little. Everything in this area of Old New York was a ruin, left over from the Unification Riots decades ago. It was all shadows and sharp edges.

Hidden for a moment, I caught my breath and thought.

The gunfire increased, and I watched more Stormers snake to the ground as a determined contingent of my fellow scum broke out of the bar and took cover behind more ruins. It was all lit up for me perfectly, fifty feet away, clear as day. There were always hardasses who thought they could blast their way out of anything—kids, youngsters who didn’t know shit except how to pull a trigger and so thought they were all grown up, who thought that because they’d outrun some Crusher on his rounds they knew cops. You didn’t know cops until a couple of System Pigs kicked your ass for fun.

I let my eyes adjust and scanned the street outside the bar, away from all the commotion. At first everything seemed still and empty—usually New York was a press of humanity sloughing this way and that in search of something to do, something to steal, anything, but an SSF hover cleared the streets admirably, and the area was deserted, and probably was for blocks around. But a second or third look revealed a glow of a cigarette here, the outline of a shoulder there—SSF officers, waiting, letting the Stormers soften the place up. These cops didn’t fear the hardcases—they stood out there just waiting for someone like me to scamper right toward them, get gunned down or—worse—arrested, if they were bored and feeling cruel. There were a couple of Crushers I didn’t mind, but there wasn’t a single System Pig I’d hesitate to kill, if I thought it wouldn’t bring the whole SSF down on me. Watching the faint movements of the Pigs hiding in the darkness across from me, I realized I was going to have to sit tight for a while. There was no way to get away from the area with them on the lookout.

The noise muffled by distance, I calmed myself. I’d heard a story, once, about Cainnic Orel, who’d been a legendary Gunner (he’d founded the Dúnmharú, his own personal Murder Incorporated), with more than fifty confirmed contract kills and not one arrest. I’d heard that he’d once hired a Techie to disconnect a target’s security system, slipped in and hidden in a closet, and then had the Techie reconnect the security, complete with motion detectors, just so the subject wouldn’t notice anything strange when he came home. So Orel had stood stock-still for forty-eight hours, waiting. And when the subject came home and deactivated the security system, Orel had stepped out, shot him in the head, and walked away like nothing had happened.

From what I heard, Orel had retired rich. Standing in the shadows, I knew I’d never be rich, because five minutes into my vigil I was aching all over and going batshit.

There was a small explosion somewhere nearby; the hardcases were putting up a good show, and it sounded like a few of them had some serious firepower, too. That would slow down the Pigs, but not for long. The Pigs were funded by the System, and had everything. I’d had to work long and hard to get a Roon, the best handgun in the world. The SSF issued them like candy.

I froze, stopping myself from leaning forward in the nick of time. Casually, as if nothing were happening, the three Monks emerged from the bar and walked past the Stormers. They didn’t hurry. Bullets flying everywhere, and they didn’t seem to care. I watched them in fascination as they moved blithely away from the chaos, and the cops didn’t pay them any attention. They were a protected religion, of course, and from what I’d heard the Electric Church had a lot of pull these days, maybe enough to cause even the SSF trouble. So the Pigs were playing it safe.

I was about to look back across the way to see if the perimeter cops had shifted, when someone broke from the bar and made a mad dash behind the hardcases into the night. By sheer dumb luck, he made it—no one shot him, and as he sped out of the light, his path intersecting the Monks’, it looked like none of the Stormers had . . .