38. Fine Dusting
Fine Dusting
Isaak
Coiled wire wound down the side of the taxi seat.
There was a lingering smell of takeaway mixed with aftershave.
Ancient chewing gum lined the recesses of the seat cushions.
Whoever Sacha had rented the converted black cab from was still using it as transportation for hire.
A lamp-post in front of the vehicle illuminated the street.
He was scanning the photos Dylan had sent – mostly pictures of Astrid herself, but also the street sign.
Cardinal Row, City of London. Running a search on his phone, he quickly found there was no Cardinal Row in London, not on any maps at least. This was just the kind of thing Astrid would do. Security through obfuscation.
Cardinal Row isn’t a place IRL. It’s a tape-space.
There was no time to waste. Astrid and Jewel were distracted.
If they were going to check this place out, now was the best chance they’d have.
So he rushed, like he always did. Like in the London Lazarus days.
It wasn’t what they planned. Talia and Dylan were still in there, witnessing Astrid torture some poor fuck named Nicholas, with a full audience of depraved rich fucks.
But they were on their way out. If he didn’t do this now, they might not have a chance. He stuck the wad of tape to his temple, Cardinal Row in his mind.
He rubbed his index finger and thumb together. The lamp-post outside went out. Around him was darkness.
Turning the car headlights to full beam, all he could see ahead was empty road.
“The fuck?”
Something fell from the sky with a bang.
He jumped. Fear dragged its talons across his back.
As he went to get out, he realised the car door wouldn’t open.
“Breathe…” he said to himself, bracing to push harder. “One… Two… Three!”
Nothing.
Counting each breath, he tried again.
“One…” Breathe.
“Two…” Breathe.
“Three!”
The door opened.
There. The tape just needed me to be perfectly focused.
Outside, the air was freezing. He shivered and huddled his arms around himself, rubbing his hands up and down.
A fine dusting of what looked like oversized glitter was falling slowly from the sky, sticking to his clothes.
He tried shaking it off, but it wouldn’t go.
The stuff latched onto him like tree sap.
The lamp-post, the car, and the vague shape of whatever had fallen in front of it were the only things in sight. Around him, there was only the pitch black of night. Worse, a void. No shimmering vista filling in the blanks, no decorative Tapeworld landscape tailored to its owner.
He tried to call Dylan. No answer. Then Sacha. No answer. As he went to put his phone back in his pocket, it slipped to the ground. He leaned down to pick it up, but it was suddenly nowhere to be found. Telephone evaporation.
“Okay. So this place is another trap.” He vowed to never tape in by himself to one of Astrid’s destinations again. As if putting on the headset to her prison world hadn’t been enough… He felt an urge to kick the car door.
Isaak realised he knew better, and stopped himself. He rubbed the missing knuckle on his hand. Don’t…
He walked to the fallen object. At first he couldn’t even focus on it for long enough to make out what it was. Everything was blurry, a mess of grey, brown, and red. Slowly it started becoming clearer – what looked like interlocking shapes, held together by a set of red bands.
He touched it and his sight became cleansed, sharp. The contraption looked like a car engine, but soft and… gelatinous, he realised, as he felt it.
Isaak stuck his finger into a tubular indentation, and it twisted itself into shape to match the curvature of his finger. It felt pleasant, yet… itchy. He couldn’t scratch it though.
Trying to calm the sensation, he slid his hand in, then his forearm, and was soon up to the shoulder, his arm fully inserted into the slip’n’slide car engine, gelatinous goop all around it.
Then the whole thing lit up, and it was gone, the snot no longer glossing his arm.
He looked around, out of breath, bewildered, trying to keep a grasp on…
reality? Isaak was now lying down in a dark room.
There were shelves with books and papers and metal pipes and other various bits and bobs, repeated power tools and deformed, sloping saws.
Some kind of storeroom? His skin had stopped itching at some point.
“Bring up diagnostics,” he said as he got up.
Familiar translucent shapes materialised in front of him. A holographic keyboard, split into two. Isaak placed his hands on it and his body shook, staggering backwards, but he didn’t fall. The hand-keyboard connection held him vertical.
The shapes, bars, and graphs bobbed up and down as the machine analysed him and the unfamiliar tape-space he was in.
His arm tested positive for a drug. The engine-oil goop must have been laced with LSD, capable of delivering an hallucination-rich high.
Astrid had successfully embedded the mind-altering effects of a drug in the fabric of a tape-space, messing with a strider’s perception of the world.
You crazy motherfucker.
A door materialised to his side.
He walked through it, out of the storeroom, arriving into a long, wide space. It was night-time, if the view out of the floor-to-ceiling windows was to be trusted. Pillars were evenly spread along the sides of the room, a space left empty in the middle, like a corridor.
Outside, he recognised the buildings of the cityscape. This was London. Or a version of it, in the Tapeworld. Why would she have bothered to set up a view of London outside of this glass-walled warehouse? Unless she didn’t have to create it all…
Was this a mirror of a real place?
As he stepped forward, he noticed the beds.
Rows and rows of unconscious people, lying on rusty cots.
Some of them shifted as he watched, but there was no sign of consciousness in any of them. There were no bedside tables, no IVs. Plaques adorned the end of each bed. Names and numbers.
Each person had a Crypterra Sleeper device mounted on their head, all of them hooked up to quicksilvered cables that led to the pillars, where the cables gathered and continued to the floor above.
He gasped. “Is she fucking kidnapping people…?”
Three recesses in the space in front of him started to move and alter, bubbling like magnifying lenses until colour pricked into dull, static grey.
Three shapes took form.
A fist moulded and emerged out of one shape, lunging at Isaak.
He didn’t dodge in time and felt the pain of ten fists. They kept coming at him and he backed up, looking around, still trying to take the setting in.
There must be something, a clue to where this place is, if it really exists.
There was nothing obvious. It was just a warehouse—
“Oof!”
A kick hit him in the back of the head. Three other shapes materialised, turning into three humanoids.
Isaak had never had any formal martial arts training like Dylan. His previously well-maintained physique had served purely for his role as the star player of the London Lazarus, where shooting and running took precedence over hand-to-hand combat.
He ducked away from a rotating kick.
The shape smiled at his dodge.
“What the…? You guys are enjoying this!”
All six figures reacted with varying degrees of smugness in their grey, translucent faces, some cracking knuckles, others stretching legs and warming up their shoulders. They felt so… human.
“Enjoy this, then!” he shouted, dropping backwards to the floor. “GUNKATANA!”
The plastic gun-sword materialised in his hand as he fell, summoned with his will.
“Gunky at your service—”
He shot the figures, timing it as his body hit the floor, the wooden floorboards feeling very real to his ribs IRL. “Shut up and help me out here!”
“I can’t shoot for you, Isaak.”
Some of the figures dodged out of the way, panic taking over. One stayed in place, too slow to react, and as the bullet hit their forehead, the figure split into thousands of small grey particles that immediately shot off in every direction.
The others looked at where their fallen companion once stood, then back at Isaak, and advanced towards him.
He shuffled away from them, stumbling upon the bed of one of the hooked-up people, who shifted in their unrest. “Sorry,” he said, an automatic habit.
Another shape got to him, and Isaak didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger again. And again. Two, three. Each of them derezzed, the light of the particle explosion forcing him to cover his eyes.
The remaining two fighters lunged at him.
Isaak wasn’t fast enough and they grabbed him. As they gained control over him, the Gunkatana fell to the floor.
“Uh-oh.”
The shapes’ arms felt barely solid, but their punches hurt like hell.
They wrestled him to an empty bed and dragged him onto it. He struggled and resisted, but to no avail.
“You might want to pick me up, Isaak.”
“I would if I could!”
“Try using your legs.”
He stared at the shapes, who stared back at him like they had understood his sword perfectly. They moved to restrain his legs before he had a chance to use them.
“Any more brilliant ideas, Gunky?” But just as he said it, he realised the shapes had loosened their grip on his arms in their rush to get his lower body. He wrestled free of them, raining down punches, and rolled away.
He was within touching distance of the Gunkatana.
The two shapes raced after him, grey vapour leaking from their eyes.
The biggest jumped, fists like a battering ram.
Isaak raised the Gunkatana and the shape impaled itself on the blade, disappearing in an explosion of black and white particles, like a dead channel.
The last shape stared at him, like it was analysing his every move. But he didn’t have to move. He pulled the trigger on the Gunkatana and the bullet flew at the shape, disintegrating it.
“Good job.”
Isaak grinned.