The Hollow Prince Read online

  The right head silently mouthed her name.

  The left shrieked, showing me her teeth, and the wound in her stomach changed, rippling with the sudden eruption of teeth. She charged at me, in an attempt to fasten her new voracious mouth on me.

  I reacted, thrusting my knee forward and I felt the hard edge of those fresh teeth grind against the bone of my knee. The halo of feathers whipped about her head, howling into a three-dimensional whirlwind that battered my skull with furious pigeon feathers. AnnaBeth tried to grapple with me, tried to pull my body tight against hers so that the hungry mouth in her belly could feed.

  My reflective illusion vanished, as my attention was focused on trying to get the bones out of my pocket. I fumbled the knuckle bones of the old saint for a moment before I managed to get my thumb through the large ring at the base of the ossified ridge of the dead man's hand. The rest of the holes lined up easily on my fingers and, fist clenched beneath the sanctified bones of St. Ignatius, I punched her hard in the chest with the holy relic. A wet stain blossomed between her breasts, a black smear like the ugly bruise on a piece of fruit.

  She howled at the touch of the relic and I felt the teeth of her lower mouth flex about my knee. A feather dragged itself across my right eye, raising a flood of tears, and I felt the quill lacerate my cheek.

  We separated and she circled me warily. My knee hurt and I felt a wetness trickling down my leg. I turned awkwardly as she paced about me, trying to put as little pressure as possible on that leg. She wasn't suckered by my apparent handicap; the white knuckles of the saint wrapped about my right fist garnered some respect. The bruise on her chest was slowly spreading, darkening her breasts.

  “You shared a liver,” I told her. “One organ and some flesh. That was all.”

  “But I feel her,” Annabeth's left head snarled. “I feel her inside me, trying to get out.”

  “That isn't her,” I said. “It's just a false memory, a division in your autonomy that your brain is trying to reconcile.”

  The right head stirred. The spinning halo of pigeon feathers faltered for an instant. There was blood on the lips of the wet mouth in her lower belly; I couldn't tell if it was mine or hers.

  “It's your liver now,” I said, “It has been since you were split apart. She doesn't own it any more. She isn't a part of you. She's just cellular memory that will fade.”

  “How?” she asked, curious in spite of her anger.

  I clenched my fist and the spectral chain dropped out of the saint's frozen knuckles. It became white-hot as I whipped my hand up and down, circling the chain in a broad arc that came down like a falling satellite on the hard bone separating her twin heads. She shrieked at the burning touch of the astral chain, screamed as her flesh parted. I twitched my wrist like I was flicking a wet towel and the chain rippled out at a right angle.

  There was no blood as her slumbering head came free. The meat was hard and white like the fibrous flesh of a mushroom. The wet mouth in her belly gasped, its lips working heavily, and then quivered shut. It melted from the top down, sloughing off her pale skin and running down her pubic bone and thighs like dirty water.

  The remaining head shrieked at the lick of the chain and, as it slid off her naked skin, she closed the gap between us. Her hands went for my throat and face, unable to decide if she wanted to strangle me or claw my eyes out. I looped the chain up, guiding it with the unerring sight of the mindful, and wrapped it about her remaining throat several times. Her hands left my face and went to her white throat, tearing at the burning links of chain.

  I tightened the links until the motion of her arms became more feeble and less frantic and, as she ran out of oxygen, I lit the chain on fire again and smoked the skin and bone in her neck. Her body dropped to the floor and the head rolled, coming to rest against the other one.

  The saint's chain whipped back into the fused knuckles, leaving a faint trail of smoke in its wake. I replaced the artifact in my pocket and knelt beside the bodiless heads, turning them so that they sat next to one another.

  I wasn't surprised to find the eyes of the once-right head open and staring at me. I picked up the quiescent left head and tucked it under my arm. I glanced at the still body and its fibrous stumps. “You going to be able to figure this out?” I asked. The right head stared at me, blinking slowly. I moved it next to the headless body so that it could more easily watch its old body decay.

  She had a choice, really, let the old body go and make a new one or reanimate the corpse and reattach her head. Even odds; either way was pretty simple. But she had to do it, she had to decide how she wanted to dispose of the past, how she wanted to meet the future.

  I'm just a surgeon. I do the cutting. Healing takes time and it only really holds if the mind does it itself.

  *

  I cut the picture of the two girls into tiny pieces and soaked them in a small dish of vodka while I waited for her to wake up. I ate them one at a time, feeling the burn of the alcohol against my tongue. I had already had two shots and, after the picture was gone, I knocked back the rest of the vodka in the small dish.

  “You gonna share?” She stood unsteadily in the doorway to the back room, leaning against the door frame.

  “The industry frowns on mixing narcotics and alcohol,” I said.

  “I'm under the supervision of a professional,” she said.

  I nodded. “True.” I filled the shot glass and pushed it towards her.

  She walked slowly across the room and sat in the chair. She lifted the glass and rested it against her lower lip for a second as if she was remembering how to drink. She knocked it back finally and put the glass down with an authority that begged for another dose.

  I filled her glass again. “So,” I said, “you never told me your name.”

  “Anna,” she said, lifting the glass in a salute.

  I lifted the bottle in reply. “Nice to meet you, Anna.”

  “To those we've lost,” she toasted before drinking.

  My side still hurt from where she had hit me with the pigeon. It was a phantom pain, but some wounds never really heal.

  Nora.

  “Yes,” I said. “To the lost.” I drank heavily, mixing dull roots and spring rain, trying to quell the pain.

  THE LOST TECHNIQUE OF BLACKMAIL

  RonTom St. John’s Liberty Prescott Four, President and CEO of InterCore Express, was not, as his CV would otherwise tell you, a graduate of the Las Vegas School of International Business, due to an “incomplete” mark received on a course in Economic Linguistics. There was an issue with a position paper. I knew this because both Prescott’s wayward term paper and a copy of the dean’s letter to Prescott Three (which mentioned the word plagiarism in all-caps quite prominently) had just been automat-delivered to me by one of our own couriers.

  “Where did you pick this up?” I asked.

  The iDeeBoy beeped at me, and it extended its ICEPane for my Package Receipt Acknowledgement key. As a member of the Security Directorate at ICE, the automats would allow me to open a package without signing for it, but they wouldn’t go away until I had officially tagged the COCT.

  I swiped my ICID instead, and the iDeeBoy froze, the image on its v-mon panel caught midway between a happy and a sad face. After a fraction, the look of constipation vanished and was replaced by the automat’s terminal interface. I called up the PDL manifests and discovered the ICEpak on my desk had been in-system less than three windings. A local delivery, picked up from—

  My hand retreated from the v-mon panel as it were hot, and I suddenly felt a little constipation of my own.

  The package had come from a “B” series station. Depot 12-B4. One of the old stopdrops.

  The stopdrops were first-gen stations, put in right after the GTI Accords had been ratified. They had been a marketing tool, really, one stolen from one of the other CorCongloms, and there had been one or more every radian inRing. P2P fulfillment went one step further, making the stopdrops obsolete, and a lot of them had been
removed during the Retail Interregnum when Ring real estate demand was in flux; the rest had experienced a renaissance during the CorpEsp Reconstruction as a useful way to disseminate confidential information in an anonymous manner. Sometimes the best message is the one that can be submitted and delivered without leaving your GPIT all over it.

  IIRC, they were supposed to have been End of Lifed as part of the ICE SI & R.

  The iDeeBoy beeped and its v-mon changed back to the smiling face of everyone’s favorite delivery boy. It tapped its ICEPane against the edge of my desk, completely oblivious to the fact that I had been touching its internals. It wasn’t going to leave until I iSigned for the package.

  I signed and licked my thumb. The iDeeBoy, sensing the motion it was programmed to wait for, rotated its ICEPane and scanned my thumb, registering both my DNA and the physical print of my thumb. Satisfied that my GPIT matched its PDL, it trilled happily and trundled out of my office, leaving me with the mystery of this package.

  Why had someone sent me an old term paper belonging to our CEO? Why were they using old channels that weren’t supposed to exist? The term paper was a minor embarrassment, even with the issue of plagiarism. LegD had spent two turns scanning every document Prescott had ever touched before signing off on his appointment to CEO. Something like this wouldn’t be newsworthy enough to last more than a few media cycles.

  I glanced at the opening page of the thick document, and the first sentence of the abstract made my eyes cross. Autonomous Microphalengeal Retrieval as an Extra-Biologic Currency Acquisition System. I didn’t even understand what that meant.

  The paper was a headache waiting to happen, and not just because it ran two hundred and forty-six pages and it had so many footnotes that it looked like another paper entirely lived down there in the margins. No, the delivery was a symbolic gesture. It was a message, delivered via our own delivery system, using a unsecured backdoor. Which was surprising in itself, as inter-corporate espionage had been outlawed for nearly ten turns now.

  Who was the target, though? my theory-brain asked. Me or our CEO?

  *

  My name is Max. I work in what is left of SecD—Security Directorate—and it’s my job to be paranoid. I call it the “theory-brain,” the part of my job that’s all about figuring out how things worked. Not mechanical things; I don’t have that sort of aptitude. No, straight-up subcognitive theoretics and abstract extrapolation, with a focus on social wetworks, viral superstition mimetics, religio-aesthetic visual cues: you know, the sort of thing that a SecEd Tag in Pre-Collapse History is good for.

  Using the stopdrops as a way to send anonymous messages had been my idea. It had labeled me with a Director tag, and until the Systemic Introspect & Reorganization, I had been in charge of security for InterCore Express. After that, well, I fared better than a lot of people at ICE in that I still had a job, but with the i3Cee’s kinder, gentler approach to corporate intrigue (read: none), the ROI of a fully staffed Security Directorate didn’t pass budget audit. SecD got broken up—most went to SysAdmD, the knuckle-draggers given new uniforms and new offices (EnforD), and me and a few others were downgraded to desk jobs. I went from “Director” to “Theorist,” and had a few turns to really sink into a never-ending depression, a hole where I could theorize all I liked.

  I had a SysAdmD Section Manager, who really didn’t know what to do with me, and I was pretty sure he was hoping that I would EOE voluntarily, saving him the headache of doing my PIPe every turn. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. He got back at me by never bothering to R & U any of my GPARs.

  It’s a very unfulfilling relationship.

  Which explains why I found myself leaving the office and heading out into the field to investigate the mysterious package. I should have walked it over to EnforD and let them go hit people, but that would have taken the matter out of my hands. Plus there was the issue of the stopdrops. Eventually, a doc audit would bring up the whole history of their use, and my Section Monkey would be thrilled to find my tag all over the documentation. It’d be all the excuse he’d need to WTF me.

  I went Out of Office. As much as I hated that three square, it was mine, and I had been there a long time. It’s funny what you’ll fight to keep.

  *

  Depot 12-B4 was still inRing, next to a Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31 on the Malachite Layer. I took an express ‘tubebus, and walked the few clicks from the depot. It was still ante-meridiem and the reflected sunlight wasn’t too bad.

  The Ring circled the planet like a lopsided halo, cleaving to the ecliptic. The outer edge was bubbled with a couple thousand climatologies where brain trusts kept trying to replicate moss and lichens in an artificial environment. InRing was home to humanity and we sprawled across every meter of space. By design, of course, regardless of the GoogleTube PR claim to the contrary.

  I wasn’t quite sure why they still maintained the conceit that the Ring was meant as a data structure and not as a habitat. Old corporate habits, I suppose, but after the GoogleTube Infrastructure Accords, it was hard to believe they hadn’t planned for this possibility. Especially after the white paper by the pair of GoogleTube Extrapolationists was leaked. Sure, they had been ostracized from campus for writing the document, but when your corporate mandate says you never delete anything, it gets hard for the rest of the world to believe you wouldn’t actually use your own data. Even the theoretical kind.

  Anyway, the GTI Accords opened up the Ring to the rest of the CorCongloms and over the next couple of clocks, the Ring went from a pristine packet landscape to a population density of a thousand per. The Retail Interregnum cleaned house, so to speak, and in the resulting economic vacuum, the SIX moved in.

  Basing their dispersal theory on the New Modality of the Chicago School Theory of Economic Rapture, the SIX remodeled the Ring into an economic web that took advantage of the population density by maximizing isolation variables while pushing separation anxiety to nearly zero. It was all high throughput packet flow—1PB/f optimization to each node cluster, delivering every sort of digital signal that a body could desire (for everything that was still meatspace based, there was InterCore Express, the official package delivery service of the Ring).

  Food, though, didn’t travel through the ‘tubes all that well, and if you wanted to eat something that wasn’t extrapolated and reconstituted by the iChef in your iToaster, you went to a B-R Emporium 31.

  I entered the Emporium, and immediately blanked the notification option in my iView. The B-R network was updating my profile and d/l’ing several turns worth of advertisements and special offers. Blinking through the steady flash of subliminal messageboarding, I pushed my way to the front counter and flashed my ICID at the kid in the candy-stripe uniform. He googled the holostat on my card and his eyes got big. He stuttered slightly as he asked what flavor I wanted.

  “Not interested in ice cream,” I said. “Not right now, at least. I need to talk to your Visual Monitor. Can you retrieve him for me?”

  The kids eyes flickered to the right, the sure sign he was on the IM. Each of the SIX modded their iStructure network to their own specs, but the baseline basic employeenet was always the same: IM, Lifecycle Management & Workflow, and MediaHub. It made the dissemination of corporate memos and quality assurance training materials easier, and the 1024-character ceiling on IM meant made it easy for the corporate substrate to live and die on that layer.

  Through the SysAdm whispernet, I’d heard that a couple of the SIX were no longer tracking IM data. GoogleTube still had a lock on cloud storage, and rumor was they were starting to raise rates outRing. Something like per TB, which was going to create all sorts of panic in FinD. No one wanted to be caught on the wrong end of a billing cycle when that rate change came through.

  The flexible monitor on the kid’s uniform made snow for a fraction, and then synched into the image of a narrow face, squeezed slightly more peevish by the aspect ratio forced by the boy’s narrow chest. Red-framed glasses (the same corporate shade as
his slightly askew collar) told me this was the site manager, and not the person whom I had requested. “What can—” he started.

  I cut him off by pressing my card against the kid’s chest. “Not you,” I said. The holostat would translate across even the zero-tech of the kid’s uniform. Outside of ICE, a SecD sigil still carried some weight. “I want to talk to your eyes.”

  “I really—”

  “Now.”

  The kid yelped, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the tone of my voice or an all-caps IM lighting up his retinal feed.

  In a fraction, someone cleared their throat, and it was a much different noise than the squawking noise the site manager had been making. Female, for one. I lowered my card.

  She was pretty in the way the internal guts of an iNuPod were: compact, sleek, and incredibly efficient in design. Pale, in the way a good EyeSpy would be. A halo of synthetic d-cable twisted in her hair. She wore a simple black tunic that gave me the subtle impression that I was talking to a floating head. “How can I be of assistance to the Security Theorist of InterCore Express?” she asked. Her voice was about as bored as her gaze was unfocused, but I didn’t take it personally. She was multi-tasking on a factorial level that would make my head explode. She would probably be able to Read & Understand Prescott’s term paper.

  “I need eyes from this morning,” I said. “A winding’s worth, seventh to the eighth. Anything containing feed of the RPC minus one plus one from my current location.”

  Her eyes tracked left. “Query,” she said, and she rattled off a sequence I figured was my current Ring Positioning Coordinates. “Processing. One fraction please.”

  I had nothing else to do for several fractions (and it’s never one, no matter what they say), so I stared at her face. The kid squirmed a bit, and I reached across the counter and held him still. Behind me, a tiny voice was chanting, “Quadrilmint! Quadrilmint!”