Look Up (rewrite of p1)

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.