Waking Hell

Book 0: The Station Series

by Al Robertson

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk

Synopsis

Leila Fenech is dead. And so is her brother Dieter. But what's really pissing her off is how he sold his afterlife as part of an insurance scam and left her to pick up the pieces. She wants him back so she can kick his backside from here to the Kuiper Belt. Station is humanity's last outpost. But this battle-scarred asteroid isn't just for the living. It's also where the dead live on as fetches: digital memories and scraps of personality gathered together and given life. Of a sort. Leila won't stop searching Station until she's found her brother's fetch - but the sinister Pressure Men are stalking her every move. Clearly Dieter's got himself mixed up in something a whole lot darker than just some scam. Digging deeper, Leila discovers there's far more than her brother's afterlife at stake. Could it be that humanity's last outpost is on the brink of disaster? Is it too late for even the dead to save it? Waking Hell is a sequel to Crashing Heaven, the novel that announced the arrival of this exciting new talent.

Release date: October 27, 2016

Publisher: Audible Studios

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter 1

Leila’s brother Dieter was dying. Lying in his cheap hospital bed, metastasised technologies writhing beneath his skin, he’d joked that at least she’d have their flat to herself for a few months.

‘The pizza delivery guy’s heartbroken. Doesn’t know what to do with himself,’ Leila replied, determined to put a brave face on it all. She went to rest her hand on his. Her virtual fingers passed through his flesh ones, her defences protecting her by refusing to simulate any physical contact between them. Two nights ago, an ancient wooden cube had buried itself in Dieter’s chest and started to devour his body. She imagined its ghost tendrils touching her and flinched back, catching his eye as she did so. His sadness and guilt pierced her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he began. ‘So careless…’

She shushed him. ‘We’ll get you fixed up. And even if you do kick the bucket – well, six months and you’ll be back again. Good as new. A fetch, just like me.’

‘But we’ll lose the flat. You’ll have to go back to the Coffin Drives.’

A deep, instinctive fear lanced through her. She did her best to suppress it. ‘If it comes to that, I’ll cope. But it won’t. I’ll talk to Junky Fi, work out exactly what she sent you.’ She forced confidence into her voice. ‘She’ll know how to kill that box. And if she can’t help, Ambrose will.’

Dieter saw straight through her. ‘They haven’t returned your calls.’

‘It’s only been a day or so. Maybe Fi hasn’t checked her messages. All this is down to her, she has to get in touch. And Ambrose is probably out on a binge. Or sleeping one off. It’s an emergency, he has to help us.’ A pause. ‘One of them will.’

‘Yeah,’ replied Dieter, sinking back into the bed. The wires wrapped round the inside of his throat gave his voice a soft, buzzing quality. He didn’t sound convinced.

Looking to distract her brother, Leila set him talking about the past. He perked up as he tossed out favourite anecdotes from Station’s seven-hundred-year history, Leila laughing along with him. They almost managed to forget where they were. But at last visiting time ended and she had to leave.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘After work.’ Under the rules of the isolation room, only family could visit him – and she was the only family he had. ‘Your antivirals have slowed the infection right down. Maybe the doctors will come up with something. And we’ll hear from Ambrose or Fi.’

‘Yes,’ replied Dieter. ‘We will.’ He was being brave for her, wearing a mask that mirrored her own.

‘You saved me after the Blood and Flesh plague,’ she told him. ‘No one thought you’d be able to, but you did. You’ll get out of this.’

In the corridor she let the sadness take her, one more powerless relative wishing for a remade world. Then home, sleep, and another day to get through before she could see Dieter again.



The hours crawled by. The day’s last appointment took her out of the office. She had to show a middle-aged couple around a small block of flats in the newly fashionable Prayer Heights district of Docklands. They were looking for a good investment. She called up the building’s management systems, confirmed her visit, and then set out across town on foot.

For a few moments, her home distracted her. Docklands arced up to her left and right, a city of tens of thousands clinging to the inside surface of a kilometres-long cylinder. Ahead of her the cylinder ended in the vast round wall of the Wart, the hollowed-out asteroid that bound Docklands to its more prosperous twin, Homelands. And behind her there was a flat disc of darkness, where Docklands opened on to the void of space, pierced by the Spine and the docking pylons that ran off it. The abandoned Earth drifted lost somewhere beneath them, shaken by endless, unstoppable storms of post-human brutality. It had died long ago and – unlike Leila – it would never be reborn.

In fact, Leila had been resurrected twice. Six months after her death she was reborn as a fetch, an entirely virtual entity constructed from the digital memories she’d amassed while alive. Her avatar simulated her living self, aging slowly as post-mortem time passed. At first she’d been happy to live in the Coffin Drives, the home of the Fetch Communion, but then the Blood and Flesh plague broke her memory and all but destroyed her. After Dieter helped her through her second rebirth, she’d moved back to share their old flat in Docklands. The casual fetch hatred she’d run into had depressed her so much she’d asked him to make her fetch identity tags invisible. Passing acquaintances usually assumed she was one of the living. Now Dieter was probably approaching a rebirth of his own.

As she walked, she checked her messages again. Nothing from Ambrose or Junky Fi. She could understand Ambrose’s silence – but Fi’s was starting to annoy her. She left another message for her, letting her irritation show. ‘You owe him,’ she ended it. ‘You owe us both. Fucking call me. NOW.’

Then there was nothing to distract her. Memories of the night of Dieter’s infection forced themselves on her. He’d been so excited. A courier had bought a piece of the deep past, an artefact of uncertain provenance and function. It looked to Leila like an old, square, wooden box.

Perched on the sofa, Dieter peered at it through various digital and physical aids. ‘Chi branding!’ he enthused, weave screens and keyboards drifting in the air around him. ‘She was one of the twelve original Pantheon gods. The first to be taken over.’ He shifted, reaching for a magnifying glass. ‘She fell just like Kingdom did. Because she was corrupt. I wonder if he remembered her when he was dying.’ He knocked a pizza box off the sofa. A couple of slices spilled out on to the floor. He didn’t notice. ‘If this is something she built – gods, it’s as old as Station. Older. From precursor times, maybe! It might even get Ambrose’s attention. He’s the only one that’d appreciate this, now Cormac’s gone.’

‘Seven hundred years old,’ she said. ‘Incompatible with anything the five gods we’ve got left will ever produce.’ She bent over and took a closer look. ‘I’m sure it’ll thrill him.’

‘Philistine.’ There was a smile in his voice too. ‘Anyway, it’s not just about the history. Junky Fi put a note in with it. She wants me to take it to pieces, check it out for her. She says there’s good money in it.’ He revolved it in his right hand. ‘Ouch! Fuck.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Bloody splinter.’

Dieter put the dead god’s artefact down on the coffee table and peered at his hand. Leila was able to get her first proper look at the box. It was about the size of a large coffee mug. Each of its six sides was criss-crossed with raised strips of wood and dusted with light golden patterns. Scuffed weave sigils repeated themselves across each one. Leila didn’t recognise any of them. One side of the box was cracked open. Thickets of wires clumped with a soft, organic-looking red gel oozed through jagged cracks.

‘She’s paying you to assess that?’

Dieter nodded.

‘Wow.’

He reached for the box again, held it up to eye level and gazed at it.

‘Beautiful…’ he breathed.

Leila thought she saw the wires and gel shift faintly. ‘It’s secure?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to have my memory eaten. And you’re not spending the rest of time ghosting out like Cormac did.’

Dieter sighed, the past shivering through him. ‘Amen to that. And yes. Fi says she’s checked it out, she’s always pretty reliable. But I’ll give it a once over before I dive in properly.’

The box’s spilled guts were definitely moving, pulsing softly in time with his voice. Leila wondered what invasive bonds it had already formed with him. ‘It looks like you’re already in pretty deep.’

Dieter chuckled. ‘Superficial stuff. Maybe I should call Ambrose. Just to see what he thinks.’ He turned to her, his face alive with enthusiasm. ‘He always loved this sort of thing.’

‘No, Dieter.’

Ambrose was her boss’ lawyer. He’d found her job for her. She chatted with him a couple of times a week. These days, she knew him far better than her brother did. ‘He won’t want to hear,’ she warned Dieter. He looked crestfallen. ‘Look, if you really have to – well, just don’t go rushing in. And don’t expect too much.’

‘I really could use his help on this. It’s a pearl.’ He smiled wolfishly. ‘A rent-paying pearl…’

Leila’s response was instant. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’

Dieter looked away from her. His income was at best variable. Without Leila’s job, he’d have been evicted from the apartment long ago. At the moment, his funds were scarce, something he felt as a deep humiliation. ‘Without you, we couldn’t keep this flat,’ Leila told him. Fetches weren’t allowed to rent or own property. Had she been alone, she’d have been back in the Coffin Drives, living in the place where her second, final death had so nearly overwhelmed her, where the fact of that agony still made her feel so completely insecure. ‘And I still owe you for helping me rebuild myself.’

Dieter grunted. Leila hoped that she’d reassured him. His attention was back on the artefact. He turned it over and over in his hands, lost in it.

‘Well, I’m not going to watch you playing with that thing all night. Everyone’s meeting up at Ushi’s.’

Dieter grunted again. Leila let the weave rise up fully around her, curious about the wooden box’s virtual presence. An adsprite drifted up from the pizza box, a mozzarella-coloured little man with curly hair and a big moustache singing jauntily about pepperoni. The flat’s spam filters snapped him out of existence.

Seen through the weave, the artefact looked a little less broken, a little more solid. Its edges glowed light gold. As she peered more closely at it, querying its deeper self-presentation systems, she felt code made alien by the passage of time thrust back at her. A warning pulsed in her mind – ‘UNREADABLE’.

It was much more legible to Dieter. His weaveware made shining talons of his fingers. As he played with the artefact they bit into it then snapped back, probing and reprobing for safe passage into its secrets. He looked so sure of himself. As the moment played out again, she wished she could step back and shake him out of it. Instead, that younger her, who now seemed so unreachably far away, just said: ‘At least make sure it doesn’t bring InSec down on us.’

‘Oh, they’ll never spot this,’ Dieter replied, not even looking up. ‘The flat’s far too well defended.’

Later, when she returned home from the bar, there was an ambulance waiting outside the block’s front door. A man in an InSec-branded containment suit stopped her from going in. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her when she identified herself. ‘There’s very little we can do.’

They wheeled Dieter out on a gurney that sparkled with cageware. ‘Stupid bastard,’ one of them grunted, as they lifted him over the front door step. A few neighbours peered out of doors and windows. When they saw Dieter, they turned away. The artefact had burrowed into the hollow at the base of his sternum, sinking into it like a boat half-lost in water. Part of his T-shirt was eaten away. He looked thinner. His grey skin implied exhaustion. Leila let all weave overlay drop away for a moment. The changes remained.

‘Leila,’ he called out, his voice cracking, then: ‘I’m so sorry.’ Those few words exhausted him and his eyes closed.

‘We’re taking him to the Arigato charity hospital,’ one of the containment workers told her.

‘But he has medical cover – it’s basic, but it’s all up to date.’

‘Illegal tech. It’s not covered.’

‘Oh no.’

‘I’m sorry. But at least it hasn’t reached his weaveself. There won’t be any problems with his fetch. And we’ve swept the apartment, it’s clean. The box is a one-shot mechanism. Now it’s in him it’s not going to hurt anyone else.’

The containment workers’ visors were mirrored. As they left with Dieter, Leila realised that she’d seen nothing at all of their faces.

She reached the block she was meant to be showing, and snapped herself out of the past. Its reasonably freshly painted exterior loomed over her. For most of the last decade it had been a burnt-out ruin, a void site projecting images of the terror-killed dead out into Station. Then, it had served as a reminder of why the Soft War against the rebellious AIs of the Totality was so necessary. With the discovery that Kingdom himself had been behind the terror attacks, blaming them on the Totality so as to ignite and expand a vastly profitable war, it had become an embarrassment. When he’d fallen, the block had passed into his conquerors’ hands. The Totality had rebuilt it and – having let it out as living units for a couple of years – were now putting it up for sale.

The potential buyers were already there. They’d travelled over from Homelands for the viewing. ‘You have to see property in person,’ the wife had said. ‘It’s the only way.’ Now they stood in a Docklands backstreet beneath dimming spinelights. The husband looked a little nervous. As Leila approached them, she heard him say something about their personal security systems.

‘Well, for the amount we pay the Rose every month I’d expect a little collateral damage,’ his wife replied. ‘Not that I’ve seen anyone who’d have the balls to attack us.’

They were certainly very happy about displaying their wealth. The weave overlaid them with a dense tapestry of up-to-the-minute fashions, chosen to show off as many different designers as possible rather than create any sort of satisfying, coherent look. Together, they blared out a visual dissonance that was almost avant-garde.

They followed Leila into the three-storey building. Its systems recognised her, opening and closing doors as she moved through them, summoning the lift when it looked like she’d need it. All three flats were empty. Late afternoon spinelight shone into pristine emptinesses of bare walls and cream carpets. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. The tour viewing ended in the top flat.

The wife nodded approvingly. ‘We’ll do it up a bit. Flashy but cheap. They like that over here.’ She turned to Leila. ‘Many viewings?’ It was the first time she’d directly addressed her.

Leila nodded. ‘There’s a lot of demand for properties like this.’

‘I think we might be interested. But we need to see it off-weave.’

‘Are you sure, dear?’ The husband blanched.

‘Don’t be so spineless, Gerald. We both know how much these people,’ gesturing towards Leila, ‘can hide when they’re trying to sell something.’

‘The surveyor can handle that.’

The wife ignored him. ‘Miss… whatever your name is, take us off-weave.’

Leila blanched.

‘Well, go on then.’ The wife peered at her, her tightly-styled, blue-rinsed hair a curt halo around her sharp face. ‘What are you waiting for? Something to hide, dearie?’

‘Just meshing with the block’s weave server,’ Leila replied. She’d try and bluff them. She wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation.

‘I’m sure.’ The wife turned to her husband. ‘We’ll smell damp. Or there’ll be rot.’

Leila called up the weave server. It hummed with vast, underused power. As a void site core system, it had had to serve thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of viewers simultaneously. It was the most highly specced block weave system she’d ever seen. She told it to shut down all weave content except for fetch manifestations. A moment passed, then the room changed.

The previous tenants had left the sink full of dirty washing and the wastebin full of scraps. There was a sour reek of rotted food. An open cupboard was full of tins. The wallpaper was torn and dirty. Stains rippled across the scruffy carpet. Leila swore to herself. It wasn’t the first time her boss had done this to her.

‘I told you so, Gerald,’ crowed the wife. Now that the weave was down, her high-fashion costume had disappeared. She wore a white jumpsuit scattered across with designer weave sigils.

Gerald wore dark trousers and a t-shirt. He looked very pale. ‘We’ve seen what we need to see, dear.’ Sweat beaded his forehead.

‘And who knows what else you’re hiding,’ the wife told Leila. ‘Really, did you think you could get away with this?’

‘Can we bring the weave back up, dear?’ Gerald was leaning against the wall. He looked ready to slump to the floor. ‘You know how much I hate this.’

‘Wait,’ his wife said. ‘We’re not fully offweave yet.’ Gerald groaned. ‘There’s still something.’ She rounded on Leila. ‘What are you trying to hide from us?’ Then she paused, eyes flicking backwards and forwards as she read a virtual display. ‘Oh,’ she said slowly. ‘You’re a fetch.’

Leila sighed to herself. ‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Well, no wonder we’re getting lied to. You don’t know what truth is because you aren’t even real. I’ll be complaining about you, you shouldn’t be doing a job like this.’

Leila felt fury rise up. Be professional, she reminded herself. Then she spoke. ‘Under the terms of the post-rebirth settlement, I’m as human as you are. I have every right to earn a living.’

The woman snorted. ‘Nonsense. Gods!’ She turned to her husband, who now had fallen all the way to the floor. He was panting with stress. ‘Why am I even arguing with a piece of software? Oh, and do stop being so pathetic.’ She turned back to Leila and snapped: ‘Bring the weave back up.’

Leila did so, ripostes burning through her. She imagined how each would play out. They all ended in complaints to her boss, perhaps in dismissal. She was better off just ignoring it all.

She said nothing else as she led the buyers out of the building. She imagined setting up a fictional counter-buyer to bid against them. ‘Tell your manager we’ll call with an offer tomorrow,’ the woman said. ‘And a complaint.’

Leila barely heard her. There was a message, but it wasn’t from Ambrose or Fi. The hospital had called. ‘You’d better get over here as soon as you can,’ a nurse said, her voice taut with stress. ‘Your brother’s insurance pay-out has come through…’

What insurance? Leila wondered.

‘…but he’s totally lost it,’ continued the nurse. ‘He’s turned all his antivirals off and is refusing any medical help. The infection’s eating him alive.’

In the background, Dieter’s voice rose in a strange, croaking howl: ‘DON’T ANY OF YOU TOUCH ME! I’M A FUCKING LOADED NOW, THAT MEANS I GET MY FUCKING WAY. I HAVE TO DIE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND NONE OF YOU WILL STOP ME!’





Chapter 2

Leila decided to jump straight to the charity hospital, leaping several kilometres in an instant. It was something she hardly ever did, because it reminded her that she was only virtual. And the dislocation that came with jumping always sickened her.

She prepared herself as well as she could. She looked to her left and right, following the cluttered streets of Docklands as they rolled up and away, disappearing behind the Spine to meet far above her head. She glanced down the tube of Docklands and out into space. She looked behind her and saw the entrance to the Wart. She thought of the brilliant lights of Homelands beyond it. She imagined that she was looking at Station from outside, inspecting the twin battered skins of Docklands and Homelands, the Wart between them like a bulbous fist clenching a thick, round rod. Then she pulled her consciousness back to the little street she was in. Jumping to the hospital was such a short journey. Little more than a footstep. She closed her eyes, thought of Dieter, sent out the appropriate command codes and leapt to its atrium.

The sudden shift was as excruciating as ever – the leap from cold evening chill to lightly overheated hospital air, from fading spinelight to hard, clinical fluorescence. She rushed for the restroom, cutting through a small crowd. Camera nests hovered over it. It looked like some kind of media event. She retched when she was safely in a cubicle, vomit splashing into the water. Dieter had made sure that her fetchware precisely replicated a physical human’s experience of life.

‘Are you sure you want the bad stuff too?’ he’d asked.

‘Of course,’ she replied.

He told her she was nuts, but he did it anyway.

When she’d recovered herself, she started back towards her brother’s room, pushing through the media event. A minor pop star was holding forth on a small podium. He was running some of East’s more potent celebrityware. It snatched her attention. She shook her head, freeing herself, and kept moving. Moving through the crowd, she suddenly found herself standing next to a white, man-shaped silhouette. That did stop her.

She hadn’t seen an empty avatar for years. Its weave sigils must be completely out of date, linking to fashion and appearance content that no longer existed. A high, sweet smell assaulted her. A moment, then her weave systems registered the absence and sent out a call to generic open source image banks. Out-of-copyright content washed across the avatar.

The silhouette vanished and a man stood in front of her. He had a sharp, intelligent face, framed by carefully styled, bushy hair. Two thick sideburns lanced down like inverted horns. A caustic aftershave reek replaced the strange, sweet smell. He wore a close-fitting pastel blue suit over a pale grey shirt. Wide lapels and flared trousers gave him a larger than life look. He raised a hand to adjust a white cravat. Jewellery glittered on his fingers. The cut of the suit and the style of the shirt were about a quarter of a century out of date. They sent Leila back into her earliest years, reminding her of the first grown-ups she’d known, vast, powerful entities whose authority over her world had always seemed so absolute. For an instant, she felt like a child.

The man smiled at Leila. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he said, but there was no empathy in his soft, buzzing voice.

‘What?’ she replied, pulling herself back to the present.

He loomed over her. ‘I am very sorry for your loss,’ he repeated. ‘But you have so much to remember him by.’

‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else.’ It took an effort of will to push past him. Weirdo, she thought, a little unsettled by the impact he’d had on her.

As she rushed down corridors, adsprites leapt out at her. The hospital was partially advertising funded, so her spam filters were barred from blocking them. She did her best to ignore their buzzing little sales pitches, letting her financial status flash up so they could see how little she had to spend. They gave up on her long before she reached Dieter’s room.

There was a nurse waiting outside it. ‘What’s going on?’ gasped Leila. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Much quieter now. But he still won’t let them touch him.’

‘Your doctors?’

‘No. The Twins sent specialists as soon as the insurance money reached his account. But they can’t force treatment on him without next of kin permission.’

‘They’ve got it,’ said Leila, rushing to the door. Then a thought hit her. She turned back to the nurse. ‘But his insurance crapped out on him,’

The nurse shrugged. ‘The money’s there. Otherwise the specialists wouldn’t be. They’ve been with him for a couple of hours, I dread to think how much that’s cost.’

‘Oh, hell…’ Leila’s heart sank. Dieter must have somehow cracked the isolation unit’s security and artificially inflated his bank balance.

‘Your brother’s very rich indeed. He could buy this place, if he wanted to.’

‘What? That’s impossible.’

‘The money’s real. The Twins did a deep dive on his finances before they sent in the pay-per-hour people.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘Those two aren’t cheap.’

Dieter was tied to the bed, held down with padded straps. The specialists chatted by the window, their isolation armour gleaming in the late afternoon spinelight. They didn’t notice Leila come in.

‘This dump is just a sodding fetch farm,’ grumbled the female one. ‘They haven’t even tried to crash the infection.’ Treatment engines hung beside them like a shoal of carbon-fibre jellyfish, medical weapons yearning for billable deployment, their real and virtual features impossible to tell apart. ‘No bonus on this one. He’s a goner.’

Leila moved to the side of the bed. Dieter’s eyes were closed. The infection had shrivelled him. He looked so fragile. The doctors still hadn’t noticed her, but her brother saw her straight away and turned his head towards her. His face had a starved sharpness to it. The artefact had sunk deeper into his chest and was now almost completely embedded. Only one square face was visible.

‘Hello, sis,’ he slurred. ‘I’m in the money! Pretty fucking cool, eh?’

‘Dieter,’ Leila replied. ‘What does this mean? Why didn’t you tell me about it? And – how?’

The doctors turned towards her, surprised. ‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘You’re the fetch. The nurse told us about you.’ He turned back to his colleague. ‘It can stay?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, no probs,’ the other doctor replied. ‘No flesh, no infection risk.’

‘Happened very quickly,’ Dieter wheezed. ‘Met some high pressure salesman. Pressure men. Did a deal with them. You wouldn’t believe who they represent! Hardly believe it myself.’ He coughed. ‘Proper old school. Too much cologne. Terrible dress sense.’

‘I think I met one. Creepy sod.’

‘Oh, they’re pukka.’ Dieter coughed again. A bloody spatter of nanogel and wires dribbled out of his mouth. ‘Turned out all right, eh?’

‘I don’t like this, Dieter.’

He ignored her. ‘It’s just an advance payment. Proof of concept. The rest is coming directly to you.’ He had to force each word out. ‘You’ll be rich enough to keep the flat. Live wherever you want. All taken care of.’ He nodded towards the doctors. ‘We don’t need those guys. Waste of cash. I have to die.’ A weak smile. ‘The pressure men’ll take me away. Part of the deal. But I’ll be back.’ He winked. ‘Shouldn’t even tell you this much. But you’ve got to know. Don’t want you worrying.’

The female doctor noticed the nanogel, reached for a tissue to wipe it up, examined it closely then showed it to her colleague.

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, faster than we thought,’ she replied. ‘No wonder he’s raving. No next of kin, no one to authorise treatment, nothing we can do.’

‘I’m next of kin,’ said Leila.

‘You’re a fetch. I don’t know if you count.’

‘He’s dying,’ said Leila. ‘Pretty soon there won’t be anything left of him to work on.’ The doctor nodded. ‘And you want your bonus?’ She nodded again. ‘Then assume I can authorise it. Do whatever you need to. Looks like we can afford it.’

‘No!’ coughed Dieter weakly. ‘Let me die! Let the pressure men have me!’

The doctor thought for a moment, then leapt into action, suddenly all professionalism. ‘Take him right down,’ she told her colleague. He nodded at one of the machines. It drifted over towards Dieter, dropping a tendril which wrapped itself around his mouth and became a dark mask. Gas hissed.

Dieter sighed, then spoke. ‘I’m going with the pressure men,’ he gasped, the mask muffling his voice. ‘These idiots won’t stop it. Such wonderful things to see…’

Then the anaesthetic took him and his eyes closed.

‘Earn that money,’ Leila said. ‘Bring him back.’

Leila watched, feeling increasingly useless. When the Blood and Flesh plague shattered the deep structures of her memory, completely disordering her sense of herself, Dieter had helped her rebuild. He’d taken her out of the Coffin Drives’ convalescence unit and back to his weavespace. Then he’d opened up his own memories of her life to her. They became a template, guiding her as she remade the structures of her past. He’d helped her heal when even the Fetch Counsellor had given up on her.

Now he needed her just as much as she’d needed him. And she could only watch. She moved to the window and tried to let the world distract her. Flies buzzed within broken double glazing, spinelight reflecting off them in metallic glints. Beyond, there was Docklands, curving up into the sky. And above it all, the five gods of Station and the soft purple orb of the Totality looked down, careless of the affairs of humanity. Habit had her checking her messages again. Miwa had called. There was nothing else.

Hours passed. As it turned out, Dieter was right. The doctors could do nothing. In fact, they did worse than that. The Twins’ medical technologies triggered a defence reaction.

‘Remind you of anything?’ asked the female doctor as Dieter’s flesh melted away, his body reducing itself to skin, sinew and bone. Her colleague shook his head. ‘It’s mimicking Sweat addiction impacts. Only very highly accelerated.’

‘Fuck…’

Pain and anger snapped at Leila. ‘What have you done to him?’

‘This kind of infection is always unpredictable,’ said the doctor. ‘There’s always a risk of adverse reaction. It’s covered in the terms and conditions.’

‘Nobody ever reads the bloody things,’ her colleague complained.

That was only the start