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By Root 1077 0

followed the arm out of the ruined screen and reared up on the table, lifting the man by the head. Bits of plastic and glass and circuitry slipped from its head and down its sides; blood dripped from Josh Kohn’s. The hand opened and the body thudded to the ground. The clustered sensors on the thing’s head unit swung, seeking, scanning, but Moh was out of the window crash and running, a man again, but without a gun.

teletrooper ducked through the doorway shielded lenses scanned gun-arm swung to cover

two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat M-16s like toys beside its armaments and they like boys blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble

fucking traitor commie cunt

HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT

the blue roundel on the brow of its dome the white circle of olive-leaves the line-scored globe

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW

death is not lived through

He ran up the Coyoacan corridor gasping in the heat and burst into the Old Man’s study. There was no one at the desk. Dust-motes danced in the yellow shaft from the window. He reached out for the paper on the desk. It crumbled as he picked it up, and as he looked around the room he saw the shelves emptying and the books crumble and rot: there was a momentary, overpowering and disgusting whiff of mildewed paper.

Someone behind his shoulder

Jacson, with his ice-pick raised high, and smashing down on

But it is in my brain

It crashed into the desk into the crumbled paper the yellow pamphlets

Death agony tasks transitional program

He ran

Greenbelt streets green grass

and sunlight everywhere

dark now

He saw them as teletroopers, an endless and ever increasing army of marching metal, that hacked into all the systems, all the hard ware and the soft: the neural networks burned, the programs corrupted and degenerated.

He was driven back and back as they pried into, levered apart and splintered memory, intellect, feeling, sense; until the last shard of his shattered mind was broken smaller than the quantum of reflection, and he died.

A single cry came from him, and his head crashed forward and down on to the databoard. Janis leaped to his shoulder, with Van a moment behind her. They lifted him and tilted him back in the seat. Janis stared into his unblinking eyes as she felt his neck for a pulse. There was none.

Van helped her lower him to the floor, then snatched a phone. As soon as he put it down it rang again. He listened, hardly speaking, then turned to where she laboured to save Moh’s life. For minutes they took turns blowing into his lungs, hammering his breastbone. A screeching stop; feet on the stairs. Janis paused, drew back, drew breath. Two paramedics stuck trodes to his head, stabbed a needle into his heart, pumped oxygen into his mouth, slapped shock-pads to his chest.

Then they looked at each other, looked at her and Van, and stood back.

‘I’m sorry,’ one of them said. ‘There’s nothing—’

‘Nothing you can do?’ she whispered.

‘Nothing there. Not a reflex, nothing. The nerves aren’t even carrying the shocks.’ He paused as if appalled at what he had said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

Janis threw herself over the body and howled.

18

The Americans Strike

They told her she had to get out, and she refused. They told her the Black Plan had been lost, the whole momentum and direction of the offensive thrown into disorder, and she nodded. They told her that the revolution was on the edge of defeat, that the regime could recover its balance and strike back at any moment, and she agreed.

She would not leave.

Van and the paramedics left, taking Moh’s body with them. Van had looked almost ashamed to ask, mumbling about ‘practical considerations’, fumbling with a pathetically irrelevant organ-donor card they’d found on him. She knew they wouldn’t give a part of this body to their worst enemies. They would dissect it with remotes in a sealed room, and when they’d learned what they could from its ravaged nerves they’d ash it.

They left the