The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [134]
“Where…am…I?” Again I hadn’t made any conscious effort to formulate the words, although it was only natural that I would want to know. My voice sounded hollow, distant and spectral: not mine at all, although definitely mine in the sense that it certainly wasn’t anybody else’s.
“You’re in a level-6 biocontainment facility in one of Conrad’s old labs. We didn’t have any choice, Madoc. We tried to flush the stuff they pumped into you, but we couldn’t get it all. It’s gone too deep — wormed its way into the marrow of your bones and into the glial cells of your brain. We can’t get the rest without doing irreparable damage to your own tissues. We may not have long before the whole system begins to regenerate itself, Madoc. Maybe days, maybe only hours — we just don’t know.”
“What?”
By now, it was as if I were a mere observer watching myself speak. I didn’t understand what the hell was going on — and neither did the “not me” that I was watching.
“We don’t even know if the effect was what they intended,” Damon Hart’s voice went on, relentlessly. “Maybe it’s all screwed up. Maybe they wanted to screw you up. On the other hand, maybe they just figured that you’d be a convenient subject for a trial run. Either way, Madoc, I’ll make sure that they pay. You can depend on that. All their precious cant about war without casualties, struggle without suffering…I’ll find the bastard responsible for this, and I’ll settle the debt in pounds of flesh, blood included. Trust me, Madoc.”
The other me tried again. “What…?”
I couldn’t get any more out than the single word. It hurt too much. The stench was unbearable — not that that mattered to either of me, as there was no possible way of avoiding it.
“We pulled the tiger’s tail once too often, Madoc,” Damon said. “After all they’ve said, all I’ve given them…they don’t want the likes of us at their precious table. They want every last thing we’ve got, but they want it all for themselves. They don’t really want us at all. Not Conrad, not Eveline, not me — not even the people at Ahasuerus. At the end of the day, all they care about is their property, and hanging on to it.
“I’m sorry I got you into this, Madoc, but I didn’t understand the dirty kind of war this is, and I underestimated the measure of the men we’re fighting. We’re trying to figure out exactly what kind of IT they injected into you, but it’s a hideously complicated suite and there are half a dozen bot species we’ve never seen before. Unless and until we can get into their databases it’s going to be a long job — maybe years. Maybe the reason they did it to you is that you’re the only man we have who had a better-than-even chance of hacking into their deepest secrets. They’re trying to take us out, Madoc — fucking you over is just the start. But you have to hang in there until we can figure out how to bring you all the way back.”
The other me tried for a third time, throwing in a little variety just for the sake of it. “Who…?”
I seemed to be gagging on the unclean air, but I supposed that had to be an illusion.
“I don’t know,” Damon cut me off. “Not exactly. I don’t think even PicoCon’s solid, let alone the PicoCon/OmicronA cartel. The wonder is that they paused long enough in their attempts to stab one another in the back to come after us. But I’ll find out — you can bet your life on that. Look, Madoc, there’s no easy way to say this: it’s going to be rough. We can’t fight the stuff now, and I’m not willing to take the risk of leaving you at the mercy of whatever plans the rogue IT might have. It can’t be a crude killer, or you’d have been dead before we found you, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be fatal. The way it’s gone to ground in your brain strongly suggests that it’s intended to fuck with your mind. It may be a further development of that VE-generating IT they hit me with, but if it is then it’s a lot more ambitious than version one. I think they might be going for the big one: absolute mind control; total robotization. If so, we have to find a way of countering the