The Hollow Prince Read online

  “What is it?”

  “The last package. The one being delivered in the ICErack. Can you expedite it to Prescott Four’s office? Can it get there before I do?”

  “Yes, Max, I can do that.”

  “I thought you might.”

  She was quiet for a fraction. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just tired. This whole thing is—I’ll . . . I’ll be glad when it is done.”

  “Yes, Max, I will be too.”

  I felt the ‘tubebus shift. Apogee. Back down to the surface now. Time to finish this. “Sophie,” I said, and the words were hard to say, but I had to get them out. “Please stop watching me. It’s an invasion of my bubble.”

  “I understand, Max. I’m sorry.”

  “I am too, Sophie.” I wiped in the image from my iView. “Good-bye, Sophie.”

  “Good-bye, Max.”

  It had been the eyes. Hammurabi’s and Sophie’s. Too similar to be a coincidence. And to be sure, I had queried a reverse lookup to B-R HumResD, which came back null. They didn’t have a Visual Monitor tagged with “Sophie.”

  *

  I was killnining all the files on my office terminal when the door opened and Yullg squeezed his gigantic bulk into my tiny three square. He glared at me for a moment, and eventually realized there wasn’t going to be enough room for him, me, and Prescott Four. He popped his jaw menacingly and stepped back, allowing the InterCore CEO to enter.

  I tapped the button on my desk that engaged the security screens.

  “Grimester signed for the package,” he said. “The one you had routed to my office.”

  “Did he open it?” I asked.

  “Of course he did.”

  I didn’t say anything. Nor did Prescott Four, and we stared at each other for a few fractions before he shrugged and looked away. “Well, I was due for another XA anyway. He was starting to get a little annoying with that . . . ” He waved his hand at his face. “That nasally thing he did.”

  I kept wiping my files.

  He giggled, and then caught himself. “You should have seen it,” he sighed.

  “I did.” I tapped my desk’s v-mon to life and showed him the feed. Grimester opening the large ICErack and discovering the desiccated corpse inside, and his ensuing panic that resulted in a minor explosion of bone and dust and other noisome particulates that come off mummified bodies.

  “How did it make you feel?” he asked. “Angry?”

  “At who?” I replied.

  “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I . . . ” he paused, reluctant to put it into words.

  “The Sandeesh family has tagged me as the executor of their . . . vengeance, I suppose,” I said. “I’m supposed to convince you that the best thing to do is to provide restitution for what you stole from them. In return for which, they’ll vanish. They have shipped you every piece of physical evidence they ever had. What you do with it is your business.”

  “What about you, Max?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll EOE when we’re done here. That’ll make things easier—”

  “Max,” he interrupted. “What am I supposed to give you?”

  He seemed just as confused as I was about my role. What did I want? I certainly couldn’t keep working here, not with the knowledge that I had. I couldn’t get theory-brain to stop enumerating the he ways in which I could be EOLed in industrial accidents.

  I sat back in my chair. It was a hard and uncomfortable surface, one I had been molding my body to for a long time. Too long, in fact, but what else could I have done? Entropy was easy.

  “I want to be needed, I think.” I glanced around my tiny—and despairingly empty—office. “ICE is an efficient machine. Like everything else. No one needs a theorist to think ‘what if?’ any more.”

  He gave me a fraction to add to that, and when I didn’t, he nodded. “I’ll have FinD retro-state you to Director, and then stamp you out with a full 590(t).”

  Theory-brain made a suggestion, and I concurred. I raised an eyebrow to Prescott Four, and he held up his hands in mock surrender. “Plus vestments.”

  “I think that’ll help me find a way to be useful somewhere else, sir.”

  He started to offer his hand, and then withdrew it, realizing he didn’t really want to shake this deal.

  Nor did I. We’d let the rest of the machine take care of it.

  He left without another word, and I caught sight of a dark cloud of disappointment on Yullg’s face as he was called away by Prescott Four.

  And just like that, it was over.

  I hadn’t had to tell Prescott Four that I knew iReset could do a sex change; that I knew whose DNA tags would come up for the mummified body that had exploded all over his XA’s office; and I didn’t have to tell him that I knew his birth mother had called him “Giselle.”

  Nor did I tell him that Hammurabi and Sophie were his grandchildren. That was their secret to keep.

  Regardless of what her tattoo said.

  *

  When I got home, there was a package waiting. Inside was a tiny hypercube key and a Instaprint of a woman’s body. A close-up of her naked torso, draped with octopi tentacles. Scrawled on her belly, above her tattoo, was the phrase “I miss you.”

  The hypercube key was coded for domicile access. She had given me root privileges.

  It was, in the end, all I really wanted.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  “Wolves, in Darkness” was serialized at the Codex of Souls site, 2008. [www.codexofsouls.com]

  “Death” first appeared in Behind the Wainscot, 2008.

  “Sequence” is published here for the first time anywhere, although it did get rejected by Talebones back in the day. This is just the author’s way of having the last laugh.

  “Upon Drinking a Half Glass of the Olde Saturnine Toade” first appeared in a limited edition chapbook published for Wiscon, 2006.

  “The Surgery of Self” first appeared at OPi8, 2004. [www.OPi8.com]

  “The Lost Technique of Blackmail” first appeared in Electric Velocipede #19, 2009. It was reprinted in Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution, and Revolution, published by Underland Press in 2013.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mark Teppo is the author of The Potemkin Mosaic, Lightbreaker, Heartland, and Earth Thirst. His latest effort at subverting genre conventions is to build his own publishing company called RESURRECTION HOUSE. He is a synthesist, a trouble-shooter (and -maker), a cat herder, and an idea man. His favorite Tarot card is the Moon.