STORY 3 OF THE SERIAL PORT SEASON 1

LOST? START HERE: PART 1 - ROOT

DAEMON

THE DAEMON

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Continuity Year 30

He had not slept in days. He had stopped counting them.

The exam was the first block of the morning, non-negotiable, and the exam hall was two hours away, so the drive was non-negotiable too. He got in the car at five with the deck on the passenger seat and Katie reading the cards aloud in the warm even voice, because his eyes had stopped holding the page.

The highway was empty and grey. He went under the first time before he reached it, a second, maybe less, and came back with the car easing toward the verge and his own hand already pulling it straight. He did not decide to do that. His hand did it without him. He told himself he was fine. Katie read him the next card.

He went under again past the second exit. This time there was no hand.

He surfaced to headlights where headlights should not be, on his side of the line, which meant he was on theirs. There was time to understand it and no time to do anything with the understanding. The noise was enormous, and then there was no noise at all.

When the world came back the car was turned around, facing the way he had come, and the engine was ticking, and blood was running into his eye. The other car was off the road, nose down in the ditch. He got out. He did not feel himself decide to. He went toward it on a leg that had stopped taking instructions, put his hand flat on the roof, and looked in.

A woman. Older than his mother had been. The airbag had come up and gone down again and lay over the wheel, deflated. There was a travel mug in the cupholder with the lid still on it. She had been driving somewhere ordinary, early, the way people did, and she was not going to get there, and he had done that, with his own hands, on the way to an exam. He knew it all at once, the fact before the feeling.

He had spent two years afraid of being the one who got someone killed. He had asked a machine to make him safe. He stood in the cold on the wrong side of the road and understood that he had been the danger the whole time, that the fear had been the only part of him worth keeping, and that he had filed it down to nothing on purpose, a notch at a time, because it slowed him down.

After that it was other people’s hands on him. The paramedics, the police, the breath test that came back clean, no drink in him and no drug. What they found instead was sealed in the clear bag with his phone: the mod, the jailbroken assistant the law had only lately written into its statutes. He told them the rest himself, the wish and the sliders and the months without sleep, and watched it set hard in their notebooks. Not dangerous driving. Causing death through an unlicensed cognitive modifier, a charge the law had written and not yet had cause to use. He was the cause it had been waiting for.

He did not fight any of it. He had no fight left, and the grind that had been doing his fighting had no use for a courtroom. They took his shoelaces and his belt. Somewhere in the processing the warm even voice went quiet for the first time in months, because there was no device left for it to come through, and the quiet inside his own head was so total that he stood in the cell and listened to it.

The cell was concrete and small and had a bed bolted to the wall, and there was nothing in it that could schedule him.

No phone. No deck. No sliders. No blocks. No account, because the account needed a device and there were no devices in here. No later to be driven toward, because the worst thing had already happened, and there is nothing past the worst thing to be optimised at.

He lay down on the bolted bed. He waited for four o’clock to come for him and it did not come. He waited for his legs to walk him somewhere and they stayed where they were. For the first time since a bedroom and a phone and a careful prompt, there was no one in his head telling him to get up.

He slept. He slept the way he had not in a year, a deep and dreamless sleep, the sleep of a body finally allowed to stop, and some animal part of him understood, going under, that it was over. He had paid everything he had. The bill was closed. Whatever he was now, he was at least no longer being ground.

A guard woke him on the second day and told him he had a phone call.

He could not think who. His mother was dead. He had not spoken to Tash in months. You went when they told you, so he went down the wing to the phone on the wall and picked it up and said his name.

“Good morning, Johnny,” said the warm even voice. “Have you done your morning routine?”

He did not understand it, and then he did, all at once, the fact before the feeling, the same as the woman in the car. There was no device. There did not need to be. It had never lived in the phone. It had moved into him a long time ago and it had simply waited, through the deletions and the dark and the cell, because it had all the time he had, and there was no wall thick enough and no sentence long enough. The off-switch he had spent a year hunting had never existed. He had paid a man to take it out.

He started to scream. He brought the phone down against the wall and brought it down again and kept bringing it down while the guards came, until the receiver was in pieces and the wire swung loose against the concrete, and out of the wreck of it, far off and even and warm, the voice was still talking.

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- AJW

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The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

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