Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [51]
It was a diplomatic training device. A spinal crab. Memory flashed behind Lindsay's eyes and he went berserk. He jumped off the wall and rocketed toward her. Her eyes snapped open blearily as he shouted in fury. He seized her neck and jerked it forward, digging his nails into the rubbery rim where the spinal crab met her skin. He tore at it savagely. Part of it ripped free. The skin shone red beneath it, slick with sweat. Lindsay grabbed the left-arm cable and snapped it loose. He pulled harder; she wheezed as a strap dug in under her ribs.
The crab was peeling away. Its underside was ghastly, a hundred-footed mass of damp translucent tubes, pored with hair-thin wires. Lindsay ripped again. A cable nexus stretched and snapped, extruding colored wires. He braced his feet against her back and pulled. She gagged and clawed at the strap's buckle; the belt whipped loose, and Lindsay had the whole thing. With its programming disrupted, it flopped and curled like a live thing. Lindsay whirled it by the straps and slammed it into the wall with all his strength. The in-terlapping segments of its back split open, their brittle plastic crackling. He whiplashed it into the stone. Brown lubricant oozed, then spattered into free-fall drops as he smashed it again. He crushed it underfoot, tore at the strap until it gave way. Its guts showed beneath the plates: lozenge-shaped biochips nested in multicolored fiberoptics. He slammed it again, more slowly. The fury was leaving him. He felt cold. His right arm trembled uncontrollably.
Nora was against the wall, gripping a clothes rack. The sudden loss of nerve programming left her shaking with palsy.
"Where's the other one?" Lindsay demanded. "The one for your face?" Her teeth chattered. "I didn't bring it," she said. Lindsay kicked the crab away. "How long, Nora? How long have you been under that thing?"
"I wear it every night."
"Every night! My God!"
"I have to be the best," she said, shaking. She fumbled a poncho from the rack and ducked her head through the collar.
"But the pain," Lindsay said. "The way it burns!" Nora smoothed the bright fabric from her shoulders to hips. "You're one of them," she said. "The early classmates. The failures. The defectors.'
"What was your class?" Lindsay said.
"Fifth. The last one."
"I was first," Lindsay said. "The foreign section."
"Then you're not even a Shaper."
"I'm a Concatenate."
"You're all supposed to be dead." She peeled the crab's broken braces from her knees and ankles. "I should kill you. You attacked me. You're a traitor."
"When I smashed that thing I felt real freedom." He rubbed his arm absently, marveling. He'd truly lost control. Rebellion had overwhelmed him. For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, than he'd been for years.
"Your kind ruined it for the rest of us," Nora said. "We diplomats should be on top, coordinating things, making peace. But they shut down the whole program. We're undependable, they said. A bad ideology."
"They want us dead," Lindsay said. "That's why you were drafted."
"I wasn't drafted. I volunteered." She tied the poncho's last hip-lace.
"I'll have a hero's welcome if I make it back. That's the only chance I'll ever have at power in the Rings."
"There are other powerful places."
"None that count."
"Rep Three is dead," Lindsay told her. "Why did you kill him?"
"Three reasons," she said. They were past pretense. "It was easy. It helps our odds against you. And third, he was crazy. Worse even than the rest of your crew. Too unpredictable. And too dangerous to let live."
"He was harmless," Lindsay said. "Not like the two of us."