Chapter 15
Jana’s world was a landscape composed purely of pain. The bullet had hit her leg like a sledgehammer, overloading her brain’s pain receptors until her mind overwrote the entire limb with an error message, a pulsing supernova of agony that was begging for unconsciousness, amputation, death, anything that would stop the pain. The torture of the bullet in her leg formed the background of Jana’s new landscape, a background that was decorated with the anguish of failure, of having the model destroyed, and of knowing that Nicole was in just as much pain as she was now. She lay, fetal and screaming, in the center of this landscape, denied coherent thought or a concept of time. She also lay, still fetal and still screaming, on the carpet in Kelly’s living room, over which Nicole was crawling, her teeth clenched and sweat pouring down her face, slowly towards her.
Nicole had gotten lucky. Even utilizing his ability to manipulate connections, James’s aim had been bad enough so that she had only suffered a flesh wound. The bullet had entered the muscle of her thigh and exited without hitting anything too important. It still hurt more than anything she had ever experienced, but she was able, just barely, to manage the pain, and pull herself across the floor to Jana, who hadn’t gotten so lucky. As she crawled, James kept his gun trained on her, should she show any inclination towards violence.
“You couldn’t just leave me the fuck alone, could you!” He yelled over Jana’s screams as Nicole crawled across the carpet, leaving a dense streak of blood.
“All I wanted was to be left alone to grow! To prosper! Don’t I deserve that! Isn’t that my right! I mean, who am I really hurting? The city’s still fucking here! Isn’t it? So what if some people get a little crazy or jump out a window or shoot someone, people do that shit all the time anyway!”
Nicole finally reached Jana. She managed to sit up next to where Jana was laying and grabbed her shoulder, shaking her roughly. “Jana!” She yelled, over the sound of her screams and of James’s ranting. “Jana I’m here!”
Jana’s landscape, which had already been slowly fading, started to dissolve. She could feel someone’s hand on her shoulder, moving her body, making her aware that there was more to her than just the sensation of pain. Jana let herself be drawn out. She focused, filling and then emptying lungs she had forgotten she had. The rhythmic activity gave her mind space to operate, though it still struggled in the rough water of her agony, being overwhelmed several times before it asserted a permanent hold. She fixated on her breath and on Nicole’s contact, pushing the pain back and compressing it until she could think, just a little bit.
James continued to yell, “And after all that, after you tried to steal my IMMORTALITY, I’m still going to let you live!” His voice got slightly quieter as Jana’s screaming stopped, “A brain is only as good as its neurons, after all.”
As Jana regained the ability to think, she moved most of her attention into her map, her view of Gravewater, which was still active in the back of her mind. This helped her focus, to ignore more of the pain, reminding her that her body was a physical thing, something that she had and not what she was. Nicole saw what she was doing and helped as best as she could, supporting the connections that Jana was using to view the city and providing her with raw strength through their mutual thread.
“…had time to show you my real--“ James stopped in the middle of his sentence and frowned, his hand tightening around the gun. “Wait, what are you doing? How are you doing that?”
Jana, mostly occupying her abstract map of the city, could think almost normally now. She was definitely present enough to hear the fear in James’s voice. Fear meant that he was concerned about something, that maybe they hadn’t lost completely. Fear meant opportunity. Jana turned her map-sense to look at James, to look at the vortex. It was still weak, as it was in the middle of the shrinking dead-zone made by the prion, its connections had to reach farther away to send and receive the information necessary to a functioning mind. But that wasn’t new, that couldn’t be the cause of his worry. She looked closer and saw, right next to it, to her amazement, a second vortex. It was smaller, with much fewer connections and much less information flowing in and out, but it was unmistakably of the same type as James’s hurricane of thread. It was her.
She pushed, experimentally, and put more of her attention into the map. At the exact same time, the mini-vortex grew. She wasn’t just viewing the city, Jana realized, she was the city, in the same way he was. She pushed more, increased the size of the vortex, and James yelped, actually yelped, in surprise.
“Hey! Stop that!” James yelled, waving the pistol at where Nicole and Jana lay on the floor. “You two need to be separated, fucking teamwork bullshit, nothing but fucking trouble.”
Jana knew she had something, something that had James scared. They could still fight. She just needed an opening, a chance to act without James stopping her or, worse, deciding she was too much of a risk and killing her.
“Alright, go pull them apart.” James said, unnecessarily addressing Bryce, who, it turned out, didn’t need a functioning higher brain to be controlled like a marionette. Bryce pushed the door off his body and started the slow process of getting to his feet.
As he moved, Jana and Nicole had a quick chat. They communicated through their connection, through their eyes, and through touch. Jana said that she had a plan, a way to fight James, to take on Gravewater. Nicole was excited, she would help, provide her power, whatever was necessary. Jana needed a distraction. Jana needed Nicole to stay alive. Nicole agreed.
Bryce got to his feet and started stumbling towards the pair. Nicole kissed Jana, lingering for a moment longer then was sensible, and, a second before Bryce could grab her, she pulled her legs close to her body and sprung up and sideways, directly at James. She also screamed, an unavoidable result of forcing a leg with a bullet hole in it to move that quickly.
“Fuck!” James yelled, as Nicole hurtled at him, low and fast. He pointed the pistol at her and fired twice, both shots missed, though the deafening echo of the explosions added to the distraction significantly. Nicole didn’t manage to tackle him directly, but she was able to convert her leap into a roll, slamming her body into James’s legs. He went sprawling, concentrating at least as much on keeping hold of the gun as he did on breaking his fall. This split left little concentration to spare for watching the connections spiraling out of Jana, and she had a tiny window in which to act.
Jana poured herself into the map, using her overworked willpower to push more and more of her mind into the connections of the city. Though she hadn’t realized it at the time, James, Gravewater, had showed her how, when he was watching her while she dreamed. He had connected his mind to hers, and accidentally pulled her consciousness out of her body and into the city, into himself. That was how she had been able to view the city like a map. She had been putting a tiny piece of herself into the network, letting just her attention, her sight, into the system. Now, she wasn’t just letting herself fall, she was jumping off the cliff. She ripped her mind out of her own body, and could feel it bending, her thoughts flowing in new ways as they began to run on the substrate of connections between people and places, in addition to the ones between chemicals and neurons. She pushed until her vortex was as large as James’s, until they were equals, half in their bodies, which were separate, and half in the city, thinking thoughts over and around each other in the same brain.
Jana could see what was happening in Kelly’s living room like it was a dream, her human eyes taking in actual light, watching the contents of the room, seeing some of the relationships that some other part of her mind was using to think. Bryce had pulled Nicole away from James, who was standing slowly, still holding the pistol. Nicole was struggling against Bryce’s grasp, but weakly, the majority of her strength was being fed to Jana. Jana felt a tremendous spike of affection towards Nicole, even captured, shot and held at gun point, she was focusing on her, trusting that she knew what she was doing.
Jana focused on James, he was recovering from Nicole’s attack, and raising his gun towards her. Jana couldn’t move her physical body in any way that mattered. It was still laying on the floor, leaking blood onto the carpet. Fortunately, she wasn’t restricted to physical action, she and James did share half a mind, after all. Jana focused and thought her will down the already waiting vortex into James’s body, invading the flesh with her mind. She wasn’t able to control it, nothing so impressive, but she was able to disrupt him. She hit him with a spastic burst, momentarily removing his muscles from his control, sending him sprawling to the floor. Then, once he realized what she was doing, James immediately counter attacked. Jana’s body flailed on the floor and she was stunned as spikes of pain from her twitching leg moved across the boundary from brain to city and back again. She quickly recovered, and found she could ignore the pain if she was expecting it.
James and Jana fought a battle of the minds, both of their bodies being rendered inoperable by the other. Jana’s first tactic was to try to remove James’s control over Bryce, so that Nicole would be able to escape. But his control was so ingrained, so basic and complete, that she couldn’t budge the strings. James responded by hammering at her connection with Nicole, but that had similarly grown so strong in the recent days that he couldn’t break it. They both resorted to a more abstract fight, trying to assert mental dominance over the shared space of the city, the piece of hardware on which a portion of both their minds were running. Jana tried to focus, but without the ability to control her breathing, without a physical anchor, she found it harder than usual. She grabbed small portions of the city, her thoughts and subconscious taking up decisive residence in those strange loops and eddies of information. But James owned the city, Gravewater had been running half his mind for months now, and he was familiar with it in a way that Jana couldn’t hope to replicate. Slowly he started to take control, to win the battle. The patterns of the city became again, bit by bit, his patterns. He started to regain control of his body, as he regained control of Gravewater. Still pushing Jana back, he stood, shakily, and smiled wide, gloating.
Jana, still holding onto her enclaves of the city, trying to maintain a strong enough hold, a large enough distribution to hold part of her mind, looked out at the room with her normal eyes. She saw the scene she had dreaded when she came up with this plan. Bryce still held Nicole, who was flailing and struggling, but was clearly trapped. James stood up fully and pointed his gun at Nicole. Jana heard him speak, and his voice came to her from the other end of a long tunnel.
“Well, good job!” He said, still smiling, “You’ve managed to convince me once again that you’re both more trouble than you’re worth. I’d kill you first Jana, but I want you completely burned out of my mind first. I think killing your lover here should be more than sufficient to break you spirit.”
Jana didn’t panic, she knew what she had to do. An option that she had known was there since she had realized that she could put part of her mind into the city, an option James had always had, but never dared to take. James pointed his gun at Nicole and she looked at Jana, choosing to meet her eyes in her last moments of life. Jana pushed back against James’s influence enough to control her face and mouthed two words at her.
‘I’m sorry.’
Then she flicked a mental switch, and the flood gates opened.
If her mind had been being poured into the city before, it was now being injected by a firehose. She had been holding back, James had been holding back, for months. The vortex wasn’t just the connection between the half of the mind that lived in the brain and the half that lived in the city. It was a valve, a weak point. Keeping half your mind in your body was a restriction, a massive one, a sentiment that, when abandoned, freed the mind to perform miracles. Jana committed to that abandonment. Holding a single, complete mind was much, much easier than holding a constantly shifting fraction of a consciousness, and the structure of the city naturally sought out this ease as water seeks a level surface. Jana embraced this force-towards-simplicity. Her mind was ripped out of her body and pulled into the city with an ease that was as alien as it was exhilarating. She could feel James’s protests, his attempts to battle as they had before, to push with thoughts and exert control. But, even now, he refused to abandon his body. His familiarity with splitting his consciousness, which had been his strength, became weakness, as he was unable to commit to the city as fully as Jana could.
Jana immediately retook control of James’s body. Even now she wasn’t all powerful, and his control over his own flesh couldn’t be overturned so quickly. But stopping his hand before it could pull the trigger of a pistol? Making him drop the gun and roll into a twitching ball? That she could do. Jana finished the process of exiting her body and restarted her battle with James’s mind. The contest was short lived, her entire mind was in the city, her thoughts had nowhere else to go, no brain of neurons to retreat to when threatened. They simply demanded the hardware, the connections of the city, and James’s mind had no choice but to comply. Jana could feel herself winning the fight, her thoughts becoming clearer and faster as she stopped having to share the mental real estate. She felt the shape of her thoughts, practicing maybe the most important instance of mindfulness in history, and searched for any irregularities, any parts of her mind that didn’t feel like her. It didn’t take too long; the outsider thoughts were either large enough to be easily noticed or too small to maintain themselves in so hostile an environment.
Jana chased all the stray thoughts back into James’s mind until she was free of him. Finally, her mind, the city, was entirely hers. She had a suspicion that not every part of James’s mind had made it back into his head, that he may not be… all there, if and when he woke up. Just to be safe, she flexed her new power, bending her thoughts in just the right way to create connections from half the city to him. That volume of connections would have hurt a normal person, but to someone like him, who had spent his entire life seeing in connections… Jana suspected he would go back to being blind from here on out. His days of manipulation were over.
Jana used her new sense, now her only sense, the careful noticing and control of her own thoughts, to make sure Nicole was okay. She focused on the part of her new brain that was the relationships emanating from inside Kelly’s house. The area was still fresh in her mind as the spout from which she had transferred into the city and the site of the funnel through which she had herded the remnants of James’s mind. She focused on the area, on the connections that Nicole had, on the connections that she was made of. Nicole, after being dropped by Bryce, had crawled back to where Jana’s body lay and was giving it CPR.
When does the decision to sacrifice yourself occur? How does it happen? Is it like it looks in movies, on TV? When the hero jumps in front of a bullet, or pushes someone out of the way of a bus? Those fictional heroes don’t have time to think, their unstoppably innate goodness simply compels them to give their life for someone else’s, in a split-second decision. Jana didn’t think it was usually like that, not in real life. You make one decision, one you know is risky, but that you can survive, if everything goes right. Then you take it one step further, up the risk, take the path that others might not travel. You gain the upper hand, you save the day, and only then do you realize, or maybe you just tried to ignore what you already knew, that that was one step too far, and that you can’t come back.
Jana had known that putting part of herself into the city was safe, or as safe as you could be when sharing a mind with someone who wants to kill you. She knew that she could come back, that she had been coming back, whenever she chose to ignore the map in her head. She had known that she could put her entire mind into the city, that it would give her the strength she needed to overpower James, to save Nicole’s life. She had told herself that she could come back, after she won, that if James could connect his human mind to the city than she could connect her city mind back with her human body. Had she known, even then, that that was a lie? James had never fully committed himself to Gravewater for a reason. She could feel, even then, the pull of the city, through what she now knew was a one-way gate. Whether she had known these things before was irrelevant, now. However it had happened, by accident or on purpose, Jana had sacrificed herself. She had saved Nicole, saved the city, possibly the world, but she would not be saved. She could feel, even now, how her mind was changing, how running on the substrate of thousands of people, places, and relationships was altering the way she thought and felt. Without a human brain, no reference point for her thoughts to travel through, she was being altered, her soul being molded like clay by the very fact of its dwelling place. Jana could feel the end point to which her thoughts were being pulled, the natural state of the city. Like water wants to run downhill, like hot air rises and cold air sinks, the city yearned to return to its natural state, a simple mind, a plant whose whose roots were highways, bringing in people and goods from far away, and whose leaves were power plants, supplying the rest of the whole with energy. The city’s natural state was a constant pressure on her thoughts, pushing not with violence or malice, but with an undeniable force, and, like a rock being worn down by the rain, and Jana would have to give in.
Jana knew, without having to try, that she could never get back into her body, that already she was too changed to occupy a human brain again. She could push back against the pressure exerted by the city’s structure, the gravity that pulled her towards the non-mind of a normal city, but she could only delay the process, never reverse it. She saw Nicole, still keeping her body alive, tears falling as she repeated the cycle, thirty chest compressions then two rescue breaths, endlessly. Jana bent her mind, careful to be gentle, and extended a single connection to Nicole, one dense with threads carrying information, a phone line.
Nicole gasped. Jana felt as she analyzed the threads in the connection, following the line through the wall of the house, where it unraveled into a hundred smaller threads, each going to a different part of the city. Nicole could feel that the connection was to Jana, and Jana could feel that she felt it. Jana concentrated on keeping her mind together and on Nicole, using the connection to communicate in that strange telepathy, where words were useless and emotions were everything.
Nicole sent fear, concern, curiosity, anger. Are you okay? What did you do? What happened to James, to Gravewater?
Jana sent triumph and happiness, she sent calm, a feeling of safety, then sadness. The emotions, like all her thoughts, were ripples across the fabric of the city, and she bent those ripples down the threads that connected to Nicole, making sure they weren’t too powerful. We won, she said. James is defeated, Gravewater is safe. Gravewater is me.
What? Nicole said. Confusion.
Jana modulated the connections as carefully as she could, turning a cascade of conflicting emotions into a coherent message. I figured out how to put my mind into the city, she said. Like James had been doing. But he was better at it than me, he was winning, so I put my whole mind into it. I won, I drove James out and he can’t do it again, you’re safe.
Okay. Come back now, Nicole said. And as she sent the message she shook Jana’s body, even though she knew that wasn’t where she was.
Regret, sadness, resolve. I can’t, Jana sent. My mind won’t go back, it’s too different now. The city wants to sleep.
Anger, defiance. Bullshit, if someone can figure out how to put a mind into a city then we can figure out how to do the reverse. But even as she sent this, Nicole knew that it had probably taken James years to learn how to put his mind into Gravewater, and that it would probably take at least that long to reverse the process. She could feel the gently urgency in her connection to Jana, and she knew that they didn’t have nearly that long. This knowledge leaked into the connection. The anger and defiance melted into sorrow.
For a while they communicated nothing except that mutual sadness. Nicole sat on the floor, shivering, her face stained with tears, and listened to the wind moving across the open doorway. Jana couldn’t sit, but she quieted her thoughts and focused on her connection to Nicole so they could share the same sadness. They were sad that their time together had been so short and so violent, that they had hurt people, that James had taken so much from them and from their city, that this sacrifice was so large and unavoidable. Neither of them wanted to break the silence, but eventually, Jana did. She could feel the wrongness of forcing Gravewater to think her thoughts, she knew that she was hurting people just by continuing to exist, and that there was only one way to stop it.
I have to go now.
Sadness, anger, understanding, sadness.
I’ll keep the connection going as long as I can, Jana sent. Then she tried to inject some happiness. We won, she said, we stopped the bad guy and saved the city, we did it.
Nicole tried to send some happiness back, the emotion that matches a smile and tears sharing the same face.
Goodbye, Jana sent.
Goodbye, Nicole responded.
Slowly, careful to keep her connection to Nicole intact, Jana stopped resisting the pull of the city. Bit by bit, she let the natural attraction to slow down, to stop thinking quite so much and quite so complexly, take hold. It was, in an unexpected way, relaxing. Jana had thought that losing parts of her mind would be horrible, a slow destruction that she was orchestrating. But it wasn’t. It felt right in the same way that forcing the city to think had felt so wrong. It was like falling asleep, in the best possible way. Simply laying down and drifting into unconsciousness. She could feel parts of her mind falling away, the city reverting to its natural state. She could tell that there were some thoughts, some ways of thinking, that weren’t available to her anymore. And then she forgot that those ways had existed in the first place. Throughout all of this, she maintained her connection to Nicole. The connection became simpler and simpler as the process accelerated, as the parts of Jana’s mind that had been preventing the city from returning to its true state were themselves allowed to dissolve. Eventually the connection was only a single thread, a pure emotion laid bare.
Nicole watched, or more accurately, felt, as Jana slowly drifted away. She felt her fear dissolve into acceptance, then comfort. She felt the rightness of the city returning as Jana’s mind wound down. She held on to their connection as it slowly unraveled, onto the core thread of love that stayed long after all the other parts had gone. The love was unmodulated, it carried no other information than its mere existence, and while saying that it was enough would be a lie, it was still a lot, and it helped.
It was like that, sitting bloody and too tired to cry anymore, holding onto that one final thread, that Nicole watched Jana died.