Look Up - Parts 1 to 3 (about 50% done)

Part 1

Arfid’s eyelids were heavy, like he’d slept well. He opened them to golden sunlight slanting in through lace curtains. He blinked. Where was he?

He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything aside from his name. This didn’t panic him. Should it have?

He rose, slowly. In one corner of the room, an AC whirred. There were wooden bookshelves on one wall, beside a wooden writing desk. There was paper, blank, on that desk. The walls were light yellow, glowing gold in the dawn light. The air was light and he breathed it easily.

Suddenly, he had a flash of memory. A dark room, grey, foggy. He used to cough every morning, he remembered. It was hot and miserable, and it was so far down. This room wasn’t like that at all, he thought to himself.

He got up off the bed and turned to face a large mirror. He was naked, which was odd. He didn’t remember stripping; but, then again, he didn’t remember much. Beside the mirror, on a coat stand, was a bathrobe. Arfid reached out a rough, calloused hand and the fine fibres of the garment caught in his skin like Velcro. He pulled it on, as there came a knock on the door.

“Are you awake?” A woman’s voice. Of course, he did not recognise it but it sounded beautiful. Did he have any concepts of beauty? More memories flashed; he was in cavern of concrete, looking up. Cars and bikes buzzed about him, and a city stretched up beyond sight. There was no light about him save for streetlights and headlamps and the neon glow of advertisements. It was raining, his mind suddenly remembered, but it was not water that fell but concrete; concrete from the cranes and the construction sites that canopied the city. From where he was standing, he couldn’t see the cranes; they were dozens of kilometres above him.

New Bombay, he remembered the name of the city.

“Arfid?” The beautiful voice called again, snapping him out of his memory. “Can I come in?” The woman asked, rapping gently on the locked door.

Arfid stared at the mirror again; he didn’t remember his own face. His thighs glistened like metal; he touched them and realised they were. His eyes were glass, his head devoid of hair. He felt an itch on the back of his neck, where it met the back. He reached to scratch and felt his hands ripple across a number of ports, like on a server. Something was sticking out of one of those ports; jagged and razor sharp. With a yelp, he yanked his hand away as it cut his finger open. Blood began to pool on the polished marble floor, but he reached his hand back to the offending intruder and pulled!

The pain was like being shocked; electricity shot throughout his body, emanating from his spine. With a scream, he collapsed.

****

Arfid’s eyelids were heavy, like he’d slept well. He opened them to golden sunlight slanting in through lace curtains. This time, he remembered. At least, he remembered waking up like this last time.

“Hi,” said the beautiful voice. Arfid raised his head to look at the woman, despite the protests of his sore neck muscles.

“Hi,” he replied on spotting her. She was sat at the foot of his bed. In the golden light, her brown hair glowed auburn and her skin seemed radiant. She had a fine figure, too, Arfid noticed but did not linger on the thought. Her eyes were fixed on his, and she smiled at him. It was a warm smile.

A flash of memory; a woman, a different one, was sitting opposite a desk, smiling. She was in a shirt. Her smile was eager. The memory melted away.

“How are you? You collapsed, yesterday,” said the woman at the foot of his bed.

An old instinct kicked in and Arfid responded, “who are you?”.

“Uh…” she hesitated, her smile faltering into a confused grimace. “You can call me P,” she said after a moment, awkward.

“That seems unfair; you know my name.”

At this, she studied him with a look of academic curiosity. “So, you really remember nothing?” she asked, but Arfid could not tell if she spoke curiously or harboured more sinister intentions. There was something about her manner… something about her polite demeanour. He thought, for a second, that he remembered this woman, but he did not. Instead, he remembered something about seeds, and a delivery, and he remembered running… running like hell.

He lay back down, pulling his pillow up so that he could see the woman better. “I’m fine now,” he said, answering her previous question. Arfid gingerly raised a bandaged hand to his neck.

“Please! Don’t,” P exclaimed, arms outstretched as if to stop him.

“What is it?”

“Pirated software on bad hardware,” she relaxed as Arfid lowered his hand. She smiled at him again. She was wearing a dress; deep blue and almost shear. “A friend of yours, well, ours, stole the software and sent you to do something,” she continued. Upon seeing Arfid’s bemused expression, her own face betrayed her surprise. “Do you really remember nothing?”

“No. Who sent me? For what? Did it-” he bit his tongue. Best not to play his cards too early. “Did it put me in danger?” he asked, finally.

“Considerable.” P nodded gravely.

“And what is this thing?” He pointed at the alien device in his port. As he asked, a memory flashed; the woman in the shirt was standing over him with a look of grave concern on her face, as he slotted in a 2TB memory card into one of his jackpoints. Then, all he could remember was pain. The memory faded away.

As he came back to reality, he saw that P was studying him again. “Hmm… beginning to remember?” she asked, concerned. But there was something about her demeanour… he had no objective reason to mistrust her, and yet he did.

“Fragments; flashes,” Arfid chose to say. P nodded understandingly.

“Yes, that is what IDERA can do if the program is not properly implemented.”

“IDERA?”

“The thing in your neck. It stands for Identity Eraser. Makes it so that no surveillance system on earth, not even RAI, can ID you.”

“Why did I need that?”

A flash of memory; he had to steal something. The woman in the shirt had said it was a matter of the freedom of untold billions.

“Seeds,” P said. “An organisation had hired you; you didn’t know, of course, that it was an organisation. You were to transport seeds, from point A to point B. You were, or are, a runner.”

That would explain the memory of running like hell, Arfid thought. “Do you know who hired me?” he asked, but P only smiled in response, refusing to meet his gaze. She looked out of the window, face hidden by her hair.

“Information in exchange for information,” she finally said. She met his gaze, and he read a desperation of sorts in her eyes. “I will tell you who hired you, but you have to promise to tell me – and we will help you remember if need be – where you were going to drop them off and where they are now.”

A cavalcade of memories now galloped through Arfid’s mind. The police used tricks like these. They had men and women undercover. Was she police? She didn’t seem it. No, she was too rich. She shifted as he weighed his options, and he saw a chest implant glowing between her ribcages. Fragments of memories told him it was an air-purifier and circulation booster. Cops couldn’t afford that. Still, he had little choice.

“Yes, I’ll tell you. I’ll need help, to remember, but I’ll tell you.”

She smiled at him, relieved. “Brilliant! Well, I suppose I’ll hold up my end of the bargain, shall I? You were hired by a network of urban terrorists; they’re called the Dimagis. The seeds you were transporting were genetically modified; we don’t know how. The man who gave them to you is a biohacker and a recluse who hates society. If those seeds hit the market, it could lead to the deaths of untold billions.”

Untold billions…

“Anyway,” she placed a hand on his thigh and leaned in a bit. “I’ll leave you be for now. I’ll send a physician in, shortly. Her name is Dr. Taru, and she is the best neurologist in the Republic. Rest, for now,” she leaned in and hugged Arfid.

As she turned to leave, Arfid’s eyes followed her accentuated figure. He had a very, very bad feeling about it all. The door clicked shut behind her, and Arfid lifted the curtain beside him.

The city of New Bombay unfolded outside his window. The tops of skyscrapers, megabuildings, and megatowers mingled with clouds of smog and pollutants as far as the eye could see. Below, far below, somewhere in the blackness of the endless caverns, he used to live he suddenly remembered. The city was glass and concrete, stretching down into infinity. Drones buzzed between the buildings, of which none seemed to be taller than his, and ads were playing constantly on screens affixed to walls or projected underneath drones. Below him, just a few feet, a metro hurtled past.

There was no sound; he seemed to be insulated from the world. Bewildered, he let the curtain drop and he lay back down. Not long after, he fell into a deep sleep and he dreamed; he dreamed of a room barely big enough to stand up in that was perpetually filled with fetid smoke and fog. He dreamed of coughing, of injecting himself with PURELUNG modifiers, of running, of climbing, of fighting.

He was running, he remembered. There was gunfire, and there were lights. Shouting filled the air. “Fucking run, Arfid!” someone was screaming. “Get them out of there!” the screamer said. So he ran. He ran under an overpass, the sounds of gunfire following him still. There, it was pitch black. The gunfight had warded off the cars and the bikes; so, it was silent too. All he could hear was his own pained breathing. He could feel a cough starting to form; a ball of pain in his oesophagus made entirely of smoke, bile, mucous, and blood. “AAARGH!” he shouted, fighting his cough back, and injecting himself with PURELUNG. He remembered thinking that was his last one. With a great force of will, he set off again from the underpass. New Bombay expanded around him and above him; his shoes were treading real dirt for the first time in years.

No sunlight reached down here, he remembered; the sun couldn’t break through the concrete rain. He remembered pausing, or did he dream it? The gunfire was getting closer. “There’s the runner!” someone shouted. A military type, he recognised, but Arfid simply stood and looked up. The city was about him, and above him.

He had such a long way to go.

There was a gunshot, a crack of pain. He remembered falling, face first, into real dirt. Then, blackness. With a jolt, Arfid woke to golden sunlight slanting in through lace curtains.

Part 2

Dr. Taru was old, but Arfid had trouble placing her exact age. With the rich, it was always difficult. Anywhere between 70 and 120 was his guess. She was dark skinned, with jet black curly hair. Soft spoken, polite. With her chromium fingers, each colder than ice, she felt him over and caressed his fried ports. Finally, with a warm smile, she raised an injection.

Instinctively, Arfid backed up, raising an arm between him and the offending syringe. His face was twisted into distrust and disgust. Of course he didn’t trust her.

“Come, beta,” she said with her smile. “It won’t hurt. Oh you’re just like school children! It will just jog your memory, beta…” she explained, appealing to his good senses. Arfid stared at her kind eyes, then the syringe. The liquid was dark yellow.

“Look,” she huffed. “Either we can do this quietly, or I shall have to tell Madam that you’re not co-operating. And I’m afraid that Madam’s boss can be ever so nasty…” Arfid’s face, stubborn and hard, melted into defeat.

His resolve remained strong, but he knew that he had little choice.

As the needle pierced his neck, a memory came to him. He was sitting opposite the woman in the shirt. “This will erase you from… everything!” she said. “It will be like you don’t exist. Then, you can fuck off to The Plains after the gig’s done.”

Dr. Taru removed the syringe and the memory passed.

“There, there! All done. Sleep now, beta. I’ll come check on you tomorrow,” she spoke with her smile. She’d not stopped smiling since she’d entered. Good bedside manners? Arfid doubted it. “Do they feed you well here?” she asked. “The last one… oh they just gave him gruel for days… drove him mad it did…”

“Yes, they feed me well.” Arfid spoke with finality, gesturing at the empty plate on the bedside table. It had been a long time since he’d eaten real meat… he’d almost forgotten the taste.

Taru cast a wary eye at the table and plate, smiled again at Arfid, and left, leaving Arfid alone in his gilded cage. Silver moonlight tumbled in through the sealed window.

It had been some hours since Dr. Taru had come and gone, and he’d not had any more flashes of memory. He’d spent those hours rummaging around the room. In the bookshelves, he found nothing of note aside from books from the 21st century. On the writing desk, in its drawers, there was nothing but blank paper – fine and thick – and pens. He took apart some of the pens, fearing they were listening devices. They were just pens. In the bathroom, there was a lavish tub, and every toiletry he could need. Aside from that, his room was furnished with a TV, a console, an AltR headset, even a holoprojector.

A fine gilded gage, he thought to himself. Finally, he sat on the bed and gazed out of the window. New Bombay at night was lit up like one of those old Christmas trees. Blues and greens, reds and yellows, dotted the city and shone dimly through the night-time smog. The smog itself glowed silver, as the moonlight of a full moon bounced off it. Through it all, drones zipped, under it all cars and bikes ran.

With a heavy heart he could not explain, he turned to bed.

He slept dreamlessly and did not how long he had been asleep when he woke. At any rate, it was still dark out. There was a dull knock, knock, knock on the door. No, not dull… muted. As though someone was trying to be quiet.

“Hey, man… open the door!” It was a man’s voice. Raspy and rough. “Dude, Arfid, it’s T! T.H.! Open up, man, we don’t have long.”

Gingerly, Arfid walked to the door. He wanted a weapon; he knew how to use weapons. At least, his body did. There was nothing nearby. Save for the silver plate he’d eaten dinner off.

“I can hear you man… I got audial ‘plants, ‘member? Just open up,” T.H. whisper-shouted through the door.

Arfid opened the door a crack, but T.H. pushed against it. Against his better judgement, Arfid let go and allowed T.H. to spill inside. The first thing Arfid noticed was that the man’s legs were all chromium, and they clinked and thudded against the soft-wood floor.

“Hey man,” T.H. said without looking at him. As he rushed past Arfid, he saw a small memorycard sticking out of T.H.’s own ports. It had the same shape as the one stuck in Arfid. “Look, we don’t have much time-”

“Who the fuck are you?” Arfid locked the door shut behind him and turned on the invader. T.H. was wearing, aside from his legs, all black. On his head was a balaclava, on his hips was a pistol, on his chest was a plate carrier with extra mags. Through the balaclava, Arfid saw confused eyes staring back at him.

“Motherfucker, you really don’t remember!” T.H. exclaimed, forfeiting all attempts at stealth. “They really fucked you up, man.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Arfid took a step forward, as menacing as he could, but T.H. didn’t flinch.

“No, no, stay right there, sunshine,” T.H. threatened, voice steel. His hand went to his pistol, and Arfid took no further steps. “See, the man I know as Arfid is my friend; well, my contractor. He’s done a lot of jobs for me. The man standing here, you, should be Arfid. But you’re not, not anymore. Not since SG scrambled your fucking brain.” T.H. raised his gun, and Arfid almost considered lunging for it but he was too far away.

“Count yourself lucky that I believe in ‘deep down, he’s still there’. But I have no qualms,” he said as he aimed. “I’m going to go look for the seeds. If you tell them about me…” the eyes behind the balaclava darted to the gun and he shrugged. “Get it?”

“They’ve probably bugged the room,” Arfid responded, unshaken.

“I know. They can’t hear this.”

“How-”

“Man, I’m not going to tell you how,” T.H. barked. “Now, I’m going to leave. When I find the seeds, I’ll come look for you. If they’ve not succeeded in turning you by then, I’ll bust you out.” With slow steps T.H. began to walk towards the door. Arfid, wisely, moved out of his way. “Tell me,” T.H. said as his empty hand reached for the door handle. “Did they sic a honeypot on you yet?”

Arfid hesitated, mouth agape. Before he could say anything, T.H. spoke. “That’s what I thought. Remember, if you talk, I’ll kill you both. I hope you come to your senses, Arfid. Enough people are dead.”

With that, he slipped out of the room, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Part 3

Arfid slept fitfully. Flashes of memories and the shadows of dreams kept him awake. It was late at night that he finally fell asleep. Outside the window, sunlight cracked the grey blanket of clouds.

He woke not long after, groggy and unhappy. Someone was knocking on the door. “Good morning, Arfid. Are you awake?” It was P, he realised. “I’ve brought breakfast.”

Arfid’s stomach growled, as if on command. He sighed and got up. “Give me 5 minutes,” he replied.

“Okay!” She sounded chipper, he thought.

As he showered, he thought. Since he’d woken, it was the only thing he could think about. Why are they giving him access to his memories? If what T.H. had said was true, then these people – this SG, whoever that was – had gone to great lengths to scramble his brain. Why undo that work? All for some seeds?

He stepped out of the shower and wiped the condensation off the mirror. He looked tired; his eyes were red with black bags underneath them and they drooped as though he were sad.

Why the hell were these seeds so important? He asked himself, and his face tightened as he thought. He tried his best to remember, shutting his eyes tight till his eyelids hurt, but nothing came. Aside from the broken flashes of the events of the past couple of days, he could remember nothing. With a massive groan, he opened his eyes and turned to leave. As he pulled on his bathrobe, he had a realisation.

What if whatever Dr. Taru injected wasn’t some sort of memory stimulant?

He paused in his tracks for a moment and considered the idea. Certainly, his captors didn’t seem at all trustworthy and he had no reason to take them at their word. His memory was just as patchy as it had been for the past couple of days. But if it wasn’t a memory stimulant, what was it? There were easier ways of making him talk or co-operate than trying centuries’ old truth-serum. There was nothing he could do to figure it out in that moment, he concluded; the bathroom, sterile and clean, afforded no answers. In fact, there was nothing he could do at all for the time being; nothing other than let things play out as they would.

“Hello,” he said as he opened the door to a smiling P. Today, she wore a blue shirt and loose jeans.

“How are you feeling?” She breezed past him, her stride as light as air.

“No different. I remember… flashes, still. Nothing else. I…” he hesitated for a moment. “I think I was shot. I remember… I was downstairs. In… in the U-levels? Old Mumbai?” Were they the same thing? He had no idea. “Anyway, I was in the middle of the concrete rain. I ducked under an overpass. And I was shot. Then… the next thing I remember, I woke there.” He pointed at the bed.

P studied him with a concerned face. Was she actually concerned? Was it a show? “You were shot?” she asked in a tender voice.

“Yes, in my back. I think. Lower back. I can’t…” He reached a hand behind his back, slipping it under his shirt. “I can’t feel the wound, but I remember being shot.” A sudden memory flashed; he was surrounded by walls of mud and dirt. There was a great, loud, incessant whirring in the sky. Men were shouting. There was gunfire and explosions. He remembered writhing in pain; he’d been shot in his leg. A black FPV drone, fast as lightning, zipped over his trench before detonating. He was covered in dirt and blood.

“Let me see?” P offered, and that dragged him back to reality.

“Was I a… soldier?” He asked P. She stopped in her tracks, her outstretched hand frozen a foot or so from him.

“Uh… yes. You were. You fought in the 4th Water War, or the 12th Indo-Pak War – same thing.” She spoke softly, barely audible, as though afraid of being caught out for a crime.

“What else do you know about me?”

“Can I see the wound?” She asked. “I wasn’t told you’d been shot.”

“Answer my question first.”

“Nothing more than that; you were a soldier and had been for most your life. When the 4th War ended, you handed in your papers and got out. You couldn’t get a job and you began working as a runner, here, in New Bombay. That’s it.” She said it as though it were rehearsed.

Arfid felt an inexplicable rage build up in his chest. He was being used as a pawn in a game he didn’t understand, in a game he didn’t remember, and he hated it. But there was nothing he could do.

“Arfid, are you mad?” Her face had shrunk, as though she were afraid. Arfid’s eyes narrowed. The woman that stood in front of him seemed, in that moment, like a facsimile of humanity. Her expressions were… uncanny. Unreal. No. Too real. Hyper-real.

“No,” he sighed, and smiled. “Just confused,” he spoke as lightly as he could. “But yes, you can check me for the wound.”

The un-woman’s face turned from upset and afraid to happy in a flash. Still… it could still be real, he thought to himself. She could still be a real woman. But… why? Why honeypot him? None of it was making sense.

The brush of P’s cold fingers on his lower back broke his train of thought. She’d lifted his shirt gently, and checked slowly. “Hmmm…” She let the shirt drop and moved to face him. “I can’t see any wound, but I did see some surgical scars. I think they fixed you up.”

Odder and odder.

“Anyway, breakfast?”

For the rest of the morning, they spoke about nothing of consequence. In fact, they spoke little. Arfid sat on his bed and ate, P sat at the table. Every once in a while, Arfid glanced over at P and saw her looking at him with a caring smile on her face. Other times, he caught her staring outside the window.

He was finished long before she had, and ducked into the bathroom. When he came out, P was sitting on his bed. She’d opened the curtains and the room was aglow in golden, unpolluted light.

“You ever wonder…” she began as he approached. She was looking down, into the smoggy depths of New Bombay. “You ever wonder how people… breathe? Down there?” Had she never been ‘down there’? Clearly not. But that was impossible. As he sat down beside her, the bed creaked softly.

“Don’t you want to ask me about my memories?”

“I trust Dr. Taru’s methods. If they’re not back by now, they will be soon.” She looked at him over her shoulder, her face lit by the sun so that it looked cast in bronze. In her eyes, he caught a flash. Like a string of code. They could just be implants, he thought to himself. Or a trick of the light.

“Besides,” she turned back to the city. “I can only really think about… down there. Do you remember what it was like down there?”

Memories of coughing came back to him. Every morning, the cough would form in his throat. It was like he was being choked by a ball stuck deep in his airways. The ball burned his insides, his lungs stung, and his throat was always sore. Every morning, he coughed and coughed and coughed until he spat blood. Then, and only then did he inject his first daily dose of PURELUNG.

“No,” he lied. “I don’t remember.”

“Pity…” she looked out at the world.

They sat there for a minute, or longer. He lost track of time. She was in no hurry, and he had nowhere to be. They were broken out of their self-induced stupor only when a drone zipped past them. Underneath it, an ad was flashing.

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