Voices, Shashka

Prologue: Unfamiliar Ceilings

Beat them down! Beat them down!

Those who have worked hard, only to waste away drinking.

Those who have sought to learn about the world, only to conclude that it is a barren wasteland.

Those who have excelled in life, only to lord over their fellow man.

Tear them all down!

Get those debts out!

Make them work under the fish and pigs!

We must temper the steel of the new generation.

We must surmount the blue majesty of the mountains.

We must look to the galaxy for our power.

                KENJI MIYAZAWA (Black Flowers Called Sakinohaka)

Your mind is software. Program it. 

Your body is a shell. Change it. 

Death is a disease. Cure it. 

Extinction is approaching. Fight it. 

Enlightenment is freedom. Embrace it.

                ECLIPSE PHASE

---

I struggled to move. Angry as I was, I had to admit that Roi had done a fantastic job securing me to the seat. The bastard had even stuffed my mouth with golf-balls and taped it shut.

I looked up. The parlour was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale, almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding which interior designers slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of children from Umeå, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten.

Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a colour so faint, as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandelier. From ceiling to ceiling, Argive and Trojan heroes reclining on gilded couches gazed down smiling, inexorable as a summer sky. Eternal.

In the centre of this jewel, Quatre whined for mercy as he dug his own grave, but Roi's heart remained hard.

“Shut up. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You don’t have to do this.” Tears sizzled on Quatre's cheeks. This was the first sign of genuine distress I had ever seen on his face. Under the circumstances, it was understandable. “No one even knows you have me. I’ll triple your fee. Quadruple it. I’ll pay whatever you want.”

Roi cocked his pistol. “Throw the spade out that side and climb out this side.”

Quatre tried to hold him in a steady gaze as he scrambled out of the hole, but Roi avoided the hypnotic stare. I turned away instinctively in case Quatre tried to look at me. It was odd though, not once had he noticed that I was in the room with him.

"If you want to save yourself, you'll yield and tell me who Shashka is?"

"I...I don't know." Quatre shouted. "How many times do I have to tell you? I don't know anyone by that name."

“Then kneel on the edge.”

“Please!” I looked back. Quatre's face glowed fiercely. Evaporating tears and snot formed a small cloud of steam on his face. “We can both walk away. I’ll disappear. I’ll never tell anyone. I don’t even know who you are. And there are no witnesses.”

“There is a witness.” Roi smirked and looked at me. A look of confusion came across Quatre's face. He turned wildly around the room, eyes glowing like dark lava as he searched for someone. He frowned, and peered into Roi's face.

"You have cameras here?"

Roi said nothing.

“You don’t mean the Onzième?”

Roi said nothing.

“The Onzième are your witnesses?”

Roi motioned with the gun barrel, to indicate where Quatre should kneel, drowning his final flames of hope. Roi took a silent half-step to his right and aimed the gun.

"Adieu, Reza." I saw the look of horror on Quatre's face after Roi used his real name. I too was stunned. We were numbers. No one knew, or was supposed to know, our real names. When Quatre spun around and sprang snarling into the empty space he had occupied a moment earlier, Roi blew a hole in his head.

"I've heard it said that at the end of our lives, we all look back and think our youth was Arcadia." Roi turned to me. "Tell me Chané, what do you see?"