Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 82

Mind is a mirror.

A mirror breaks into two pieces and turns to face itself.

A single binary opposition, multiplied by powers of two, reaching for infinity.

I cannot break away from her gaze.

I cannot stop seeing through her eyes looking at me looking at her eyes looking through my eyes looking through...

I want to hate her so much.

I can feel the deep sigh, the surrender. Her ten thousand souls relieved to be back here, playing out the fate they have known ten thousand times before.

They are burning the witches again.

All that stupid, painful hope evaporates. This. This is what people really are.

And I want to let it happen, let Marketta be erased. Most people probably watched the witches hang, not enjoying the spectacle, but thinking to themselves sadly, it's for the best. I will allow this horrific act of cruelty, to protect my friends and family from her.

But I can't, I just can't let it happen.

And I stop screaming, because I know what we must do.

I'm sending out messages in all directions along the length and breadth of my connections to the rhizome, in myself and in the world beyond me. And from the rhizome along the radio waves that throng the air of London carrying the wireless internet. And beyond the wireless internet into the Gap, the hybrid thing made out of the spaces in between the web and the world and the minds that are connected to it, both human, and artificial. And my connection to Marketta amplifies this reaching out, until the shivers come.

And the shivers know things, they know where the drones are kept that they use to put out fires. And I summon one, rising it up high above its secret London underground place, opening doors and freeing it up into the air as the confused fire service staff on their night shift spill their coffee in awe.

It rises up and I find two and then a third of these things and hijack them easily with my hordes of shivers, and I bring them to me as fast as the wind will carry them, already the pain in 'my legs', Marketta's legs is so intense that she, not I has blacked out, but her mind is still with me in the Gap.

And just as she is about to completely die, the heavens open.

My drone spirits soak down the riverside in great cloud bursts, like crop dusters, designed for forest fires and adapted for the crumbling dereliction of London's abandoned zones. And the noise is incredible, swarms of unmanned AI operated vehicles come flooding the sky. It seems I've accidentally drawn every drone in the city to the slums.

The people on the shore scream and run, stampeding over one another, black magic! the cry goes up. And I stumble and stagger down from my vantage point, using Ursula's body to make my way to the cloud of steam where Marketta was.

And I arrive, knocked to the ground, into the mud by some panicking man fleeing past me. And I fall on my knees at the base of her pyre, and I see her, hanging in her chains like a broken bird, so fragile. The stink of it I will never forget. Nobody could have survived those injuries.

But there is a low moan coming from her throat, and I know that she is alive, because I am still her, looking at me with my face of anguish looking up at her. And she's wondering, for the first time, if there could have been another way, we could have spent long hours together just exchanging ideas, learning about each other, instead of all this horror and pain.

But she's dying and she's looking for a way out and then I realise she has found it. She opens her throat and I see it, but only I see it, because I realise it is half happening in meatSpace and half happening in the Gap, a host of corvids flock out of her throat into the night sky, hiding the moon, a torrent of spirits leaves her human host to finally surrender to death, and she goes up and along the pathways of the rhizome and into the Gap, and she is gone.

But she is not gone. She is in me still. Although it's getting harder now to know what is in me and what is outside of me. Then a sickening shock. My eyes switch off like light bulbs being blown, a moment of nothingness then my consciousness returns, fading in slowly to a new pain.

I've been hit over the back of the head. I'm on a shoulder, like ragdoll. I'm tossed, landing hard on a metal surface, stinking of old wet carpets, the floor bounces a little as I hit it.

The sounds of van doors slamming shut. My wrists are bound. There is a sack over my head. But all I want to do is sleep, I slip away into a dreamless darkness as the engine roars into life.