Fic: Meat 3/8 (Sherlock BBC)
Jul. 15th, 2012 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Meat
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks tokeevacaereni for all her beta help!
Previous chapters: 1 | 2
John comes awake slowly. He’s been dreaming. Not a nightmare, for which he knows he ought to be grateful—though at least, with those, there’s the relief when he wakes.
Tonight he was dreaming about cases again. Not the bad-dream parts, the dead bodies of victims and their wailing families, but the thrill of it, and the odd kind of solidity that came with having a good fight to fight again. Like when he first moved in with Sherlock—what he’s laughably begun to think of as ‘the old days’, though in reality it was less than two years ago.
The dream comes back to him in scraps, disjointed, though it probably wasn’t very coherent to begin with. Something about the second case they ever worked on—the Black Lotus assassin and his brilliant, unwilling accomplice of a sister, who’d been leaving SOS messages to float out into the matrix as bright as flares. (Or at least, that’s how Sherlock put it. He’d been the only person to actually read them.) Other images: some breathless moment in darkness when they’d been running over rooftops. Both of them, out in the city together, with the night air cold in their lungs, and Sherlock hadn’t paused once to look disgusted at the clatter and clamour of life all around them, the sounds of the city and its lights and smells, the pockets of warmth from ventilation shafts, swirling colours of adverts projected into the air, overheard snatches of conversation, all that imperfect mess of living data.
John still feels breathless with it.
There had been something else, too.
Sherlock had spoken to him. “I need to go and see a woman about—” something, he’d said. And John had turned to say, “I’ll come with you,” and Sherlock had disappeared before his eyes in a crackle of interference, like an image on archaic videotape. John reached out a hand toward him and his fingers raked through empty air.
Now, he realizes that he’s still reaching out—as though he’s woken expecting someone else to be on the other side of the bed. Fat chance of that. He curls his hand shut and pulls it back into his chest, pressing his lips together.
A woman. The Woman. That had been Irene Adler’s handle—the wily data-thief who’d burned through the London underworld like cold fire and through Sherlock’s mind with the same intensity, and then finally burned out in an anonymous hotel room across town. Flatlined. A trap, the police had said, set by betrayed associates or criminal rivals currently still unknown. Adler had been remarkably good at keeping her face hidden while she was alive—she must’ve had some bloody good plastic surgeons in her pocket—but the DNA results left no doubt.
Sherlock had never actually met Adler face-to-face, but then those kinds of distinctions have never really seemed to matter to him. When he found out she was dead he jacked into the matrix and worked for ten hours straight. He didn’t speak to John—or anyone—for two days after that.
John never quite let on how sick that made him feel. He’s never dared bring it up since, either.
And things were never quite the same, afterwards. The last couple of days, though, he’s caught himself wondering if this is it—the turning-point. If things will start to look up, now they’ve got a case and Sherlock’s asking for his help again, and if one day Sherlock will grab him by the arm and drag him out into the maze of London to do something unbelievably daft at some utterly inappropriate hour of the night, awake and alive to it, the old manic joy back in his eyes.
It hasn’t happened, yet. He probably ought to stop thinking that it might.
That’s why he hates these dreams more than the nightmares. Waking up screaming, he can handle. But when he wakes up hoping—that’s worse. The emptiness that follows. The hollow that makes its home inside his chest.
John groans, and scrubs a hand over his eyes. It’s dawn, greyish and murky, outside his window. No point trying to get any more sleep. He sloughs off his blanket, sets his feet on the floor, and curls up into a sitting position, watching the indent his body has left in the ancient temperfoam slowly fade into nothing.
* * *
John hears voices on his way downstairs, and frowns to himself. Bit early for that, surely?
“At least you’ve come to me directly this time,” Sherlock is saying, “much as it must pain you to deny your team another opportunity to display their staggering incompetence.”
“Anderson’s doing much better, thanks for asking.”
“Pity,” says Sherlock, and John clatters down the last few steps and pushes open the door, deciding he’d better join the conversation before damage control becomes post-damage cleanup.
“Morning, Greg,” he says, trying his damnedest to sound halfway alert and cheerful. “Something important come up?”
Despite the mirrored visor that covers his eyes, Lestrade manages to look simultaneously harassed, concerned, and relieved to see him, which John thinks is something of an achievement. “John.” He nods. “You could say that. Take it Sherlock told you about our latest show-off? Desperate to get caught, by the looks of it.”
John can’t help bristling, though he can’t exactly say, I helped with that, without admitting he’s been nicking private records on Sherlock’s behalf. “Yeah,” he says, instead. “Yeah, he did.”
“Some cowboy. If it was meatspace he’d be spraypainting ‘I was ‘ere’ on the wall of every building he broke into. We’ll have him soon enough.”
“This is no cowboy,” Sherlock sniffs. “Though you’re right, he is desperate to get caught. Just not by you.”
“Well, maybe you could make use of the fact it’s your attention he’s so desperate to get, and decipher his latest love letter?”
Sherlock sits down and makes as if to lift the deck into his lap. Then he pauses, and turns to look straight at Lestrade. His gaze is penetrant; disconcerting. “This case has risen to the top of your list of priorities rather fast,” he says. “It’s suddenly important enough for you to have come round in person, when a phone call would surely have sufficed.”
“Oh, you know,” Lestrade says, with a shrug. “I was passing.”
I was worried, John hears in his voice, as clearly as if it were spoken aloud. No doubt Sherlock’s been aware of the real reason for Lestrade’s visit since he saw the car pull up outside—and no doubt that means he’s going to be insufferable for the rest of the morning.
John knows Sherlock and Lestrade have some kind of history, even if they’re not exactly best mates, and he knows better than to try asking Sherlock about it. He also knows that, whatever that history is, it occasionally prompts Lestrade to phone or knock on their door on the flimsiest of pretexts, and to give Sherlock searching, worried looks. Lestrade is also the only person other than himself John’s ever known dare to suggest Sherlock might be ‘overdoing it a bit’—and Sherlock’s even seemed to listen to him, a couple of times. (Okay, ‘listen’ here means ‘switch off the deck for a ten-minute nap and glare evilly at anyone who implies it’s well overdue,’ but this is Sherlock. These things are relative.) That was a while ago, though.
Now, Sherlock just snorts, fishes in the pocket of his dressing gown for a stimulant derm and pushes up his sleeve to press it onto the skin of his inner arm. “Yes, thank you, Lestrade. If your touching display of concern is quite finished, perhaps you’d kindly let me get on with my work?”
John ignores him as pointedly as he possibly can. “Cup of coffee, Greg?”
“Nah, thanks. I’d better get back.” Lestrade turns for the door. “Keep an eye on this insufferable shit, won’t you?”
There’s no heat behind it, but there’s not much amusement, either. John nods mutely, and watches him go.
* * *
Another construct from his old life. A bedsit—Spartan: black temperfoam slab on the floor; tangle of computer equipment beside the tiny window; rubbish bin, in need of emptying, in the corner.
He glances down.
A handful of pills.
Then—the room tilts and whirls around him. The world speeds up. His thief has put time and effort into this, accurately recreating the sensations of amphetamine overdose. (And a few other things. Even Sherlock doesn’t remember the exact cocktail; he’d been withdrawing, hard, from puppet-theatre tranks at the time. How could the thief know? Access to his medical records? Mycroft’s private systems will be his next stop.)
Years away, in the front room at 221B Baker Street, his heart races.
A pounding at the door.
“Holmes! Sherlock, I know you’re in there! What the fuck have you—”
The construct folds away into nothingness. Not even the clean, transparent grid of the matrix, and its absence itches inside his skull. Nothingness: a lacuna that demands to be filled, a tenebrous space that would crawl with feardesperationneedeverything, with the irrational, if he faltered for a moment, if he let it in.
Data—however cryptic the form in which it presents itself—is safe. The lack of it leaves gaps for uninvited guests to slip through.
As if in answer, a blossoming. Clinical white. He’s alone in a room—a familiar one, and he’s been half-expecting it. It’s the hospital room (paid for by Mycroft’s money; a vain attempt to make him feel his obligation) he woke up in five years ago, reproduced, as expected, in every particular.
Well, except one. He’s alone, which is an inaccuracy, though it’s also a blessing. No Mycroft to sit beside the bed pursing his lips, sparing one eye with which to fix Sherlock even as the other scans banks of government data, sighing ‘I expected you to have grown out of this by now,’ expressing his sadness, his disappointment, the inconvenience to which this has put him, ad nauseam.
There’s a catheter in the back of his left hand. He pulls it out, admires the resulting pattern of blood droplets that forms on the pristine white sheets. (The satisfaction that accompanies the spoiling of some small thing in this depressing scene instinctive, no less palpable because neither sheets nor blood are real.) He sits up.
Antiquated simstim unit in the corner of the room. Sherlock never used it when he was in here—simulated meatspace has never been his idea of a good time—but now, it draws the eye. And if he’s looking at it, it’s because he is intended to do so. The message will be in there.
False realities within false realities. Again. He is being played with. Someone, he suspects, is trying to make him lose his grip.
The stim segment is uninteresting, the kind of daytime talk and fashion inanity with which Mrs Hudson is so fond of filling her afternoons. The presenter has clearly been nipped and tucked, augmented and diminished, to within an inch of her life, but the sensation of inhabiting unfamiliar flesh draws attention to the sheer corporeality of it all (‘reality’, that’s a misnomer—though, is it? Is sensation any less real because recorded?) and her body feels bulky—inescapably, messily present. Accessing John’s sensorium via the rig has never been anywhere near this unpleasant; the familiarity of it keeps it from demanding so much of his attention. (Though, this morning—but, no. Now is not the time to think about that.) And at least, when he sees through John’s eyes and feels through his skin, he can flip back into the matrix any time he chooses. Here, he has to stay alert—stay trapped—for fear of missing some vital clue.
Simstim is predicated on sensuality, on the physical pleasure of inhabiting an idealised body. Unbidden, words—never heard, only transmitted via the matrix, but indelibly marked on his memory nonetheless—spring to mind. Irene’s words.
“You’d upload, if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Goodness, no. One ought to maintain a healthy regard for the flesh, don’t you think?”
“Enlighten me. What’s ‘healthy’ about decay?”
No. Concentrate. He pushes the conversation from his mind.
The presenter is standing before wide, arched windows, balancing expertly on her skyscraper heels. The pain that must have throbbed in the arches of her feet during recording has been edited out, but the rub of leather against her feet, the liquid slide of her silk blouse, the cool brush of an incoming breeze, are inescapable. Sensations designed to be pleasurable, and most people would surely find them so, but that’s because most people have nothing better to do with their minds. To Sherlock, they’re irritants; nothing more. Delineating the boundaries of flesh, its limitations. Its imprisoning walls.
The host crosses to a plush, overstuffed armchair and sinks into it. Stocking-friction between her thighs as she crosses her legs. Uncomfortable; it makes him want to squirm. (Perhaps, seated before the deck in his flat, he does.) She sits quite still and curves her lips, sticky with gloss, in a placid smile.
The woman seated opposite her is tall, slender, fashionably-dressed, her irises a striking, unnatural iridescent green. Her face: vaguely familiar from advertisements. Former model, then; aware of the inevitably transient nature of success in her field, and now attempting to build a career in fashion design.
“Nerina Lee is with me today,” says the host, “and we’ll be trying out some of the pieces from her Autumn collection shortly. But perhaps you’d like to tell us a little more about it first?”
The model smiles, and sits up straighter. “Well, Connie,” she begins, “this season I’ve been taking inspiration from—”
And she stops, abruptly—or, rather, is stopped. Her face is briefly immobile, mouth gaping around her arrested response—but only briefly. She changes, then.
The light streaming in through the open windows fades, and clouds the dark grey of a dead screen bank ominously in the simulated sky. Skilfully-rendered shadows pool in her eye-sockets. Her outline melts and coalesces into something—someone—else.
A man. His face: obscured in darkness, but for twin sharp, mad glints in the hollows of his eyes. This is his adversary; Sherlock is certain of it.
The shadowed eyes regard him intently for a long moment.
“That was your clue,” it says, at last. Not the voice he’s been anticipating. Soft, faintly accented; Dublin, at a guess. Almost friendly. There’s no VR-villain playacting here, and he reprimands himself inwardly for expecting the obvious. “Better not waste it.” The figure sounds as though it is smiling. “Can you guess who you’re playing for this time?”
Sherlock ignores the taunt. The little opening tableau has already given him his answer: the most resourceful criminal in the country would have difficulty getting to Mycroft—and anyone who knows Sherlock’s life as intimately as this man appears to would doubt the efficacy of a threat against his life as a motivator—so it must be Lestrade.
“I was going to warn you,” the voice continues, “not to think about telling your friends—all three of them—how they’re involved in our little game. But you weren’t going to, were you?” It sounds delighted. “You just have to work it out by yourself. You know they’d never understand.”
“Who are you?” he demands, instead of responding. The presenter’s voice is entirely unlike his own: it’s soft and pleasantly modulated; lacking the necessary force. He swallows and tries again. “What’s the point of all this? It’s a clever enough little game, but I’m losing patience.”
“Oh, come off it,” the voice purrs. “You’ve been waiting for someone like me for years.” Then, as though it’s an afterthought: “You can call me Jim, by the way.”
“And you’d know my mind better than I do, would you?” he asks, scornful, even as he tucks away the name for future reference.
But the construct is beginning to shimmer, to lose integrity. It fades out around him and he is alone in the colourless grid of the matrix, the ghosts of recorded shadow and light lingering as though he has looked too long at the sun.
* * *
The matrix, shadowless and laboratory-clean; the home his mind deserves. To enter it is to burn away the mess of self; the disabling weaknesses of the body; the unpredictable, distracting wash of hormone and emotion. Here, he is reduced—but no, that’s altogether the wrong word. Here, he is freed. Pared down to essentials, to the bare wiring that keeps consciousness alive, and simultaneously allowed to expand far, far past the limits of sight and sense. The city—the whole world—spreads itself out before him, laid open in clear, clean lines of data. Seen both as through the lens of a microscope, and as from high orbit. An infinity of puzzles for him to solve, each salient detail lighting up for him until the entirety of the picture becomes clear, photic pointillism invisible to lesser minds.
He could live here forever, never bored—and if the longing that thought brings is accompanied by a throb of inexplicable sorrow (John), or a second’s uncertainty, it is soon quashed.
Here, there is no reason for him to be limited by form. Here, he has tentacles.
‘Jim’, whoever he may be, is about to become their search-object.
Examining Mycroft’s private systems has yielded nothing; nor has investigating the sites of other recent major security breaches. ‘Jim’ is good at covering his tracks. Still. Sherlock has other methods. In the matrix, he need never be inconvenienced by the presence of others—by the pressing-in of their needs, their demands, their half-awake minds. But when he wishes to be, he is endlessly connected.
The Wig (real name: Josh Wiggins; location: Tower Hamlets) is a slum neophyte; what common parlance, with its borrowed Sprawl neologisms, would term a hotdogger. Far too small-time to come to the attention of corporate security systems. The Wig is talented, and his handle might one day be well-known in underworld circles, but for now, he’s more interested in impressing his friends than in serious data-theft.
And he has a lot of friends. Every slum kid with access to a deck fancies him or herself a criminal legend, known throughout London and Tokyo and the Sprawl. There’s little else for bored teenagers in what are euphemistically termed the ‘underprivileged boroughs’ to do. It’s the work of a moment to fire off a message intimating serious reward for anybody able to provide information on the mysterious ‘Jim’ or on any criminal activity more unusual, more audacious, than the norm. The criminal up-and-comers of the city are set up to feed Sherlock’s hard drive, functioning as his eyes and ears. There’ll be a steady stream of data for him to sift through, soon.
For now, though, he has a fashion show to watch.
* * *
John drinks his coffee and munches on a nutrient bar while Sherlock sits motionless on the other side of the living room. He switches on the inbuilt wall screen to glance through the morning headlines. Nothing on the mysterious data-thefts, but that’s not surprising; both the cops and the corporations are bound to want this as hush-hush as possible right now. There’s a whole segment on some Japanese idol’s latest virtual ‘tour’, the entertainment correspondent burbling interminably about stunning new advances in immersive broadcast technology, and he raises his eyebrows, opens his mouth to remark, “This is news?” before remembering that nobody’s listening.
He switches off. He showers, dresses, drops back into his armchair and flicks through the channels, but he can’t sit still. He eyes the simstim unit, but doubts there’s anything interesting on. He can distract himself with it, sometimes, but other times, the segments feel washed-out and dull in comparison to the real, to the life he and Sherlock have. Used to have. He suspects that today is one of those times. The silence itches under his skin.
He contemplates ringing Sarah to see if there are any extra shifts at the clinic he can pick up, or if she just fancies meeting up for some lunch. Cheap food and overpriced coffee might not be as exciting as chasing after criminals with Sherlock, but at least he’d have someone to talk to.
The time display is showing 11:13 when Sherlock finally jacks out. But all he says to John is, “Daytime fashion simstim segment. Presenter named Connie. What channel?”
“Um, two eleven, I think.” John says, and then his brain catches up with the conversation and registers, what the fuck? “Wait, you want to watch the Connie Prince show? What’s that got to do with anything?”
Sherlock looks at him with the ghost of a glint in his eyes, but they light on him only for a second, their focus clearly far away. “I’m about to find out,” he says, and presses the stim unit’s trodes onto his forehead.
John shakes his head, and calls Sarah.
* * *
On his way out of the flat, John notices a black car—German, but modelled after the old Bentleys—idling near the pavement opposite. The woman who tailed them the other night is sitting in the back, window wound down, her mirrored implants reflecting the Baker Street traffic. Slightly incongruous in the daylight—darkened alleys seem more like her natural habitat—but still not really someone whose notice John wants to court. She glances once in his direction, registers his presence, but then looks away again, apparently dismissing him as an irrelevance. The car makes no move to follow him. It’s obviously Sherlock she’s watching for.
Frankly, he doesn’t know why Mycroft bothers. It’s not as though Sherlock ever leaves the flat unless he has to, these days.
Still, he can’t help glancing up at their front window himself, just the once. There’s no sign of life. He shrugs, and continues down the street.
Chapter 4
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks to
keevacaereni for all her beta help!Previous chapters: 1 | 2
John comes awake slowly. He’s been dreaming. Not a nightmare, for which he knows he ought to be grateful—though at least, with those, there’s the relief when he wakes.
Tonight he was dreaming about cases again. Not the bad-dream parts, the dead bodies of victims and their wailing families, but the thrill of it, and the odd kind of solidity that came with having a good fight to fight again. Like when he first moved in with Sherlock—what he’s laughably begun to think of as ‘the old days’, though in reality it was less than two years ago.
The dream comes back to him in scraps, disjointed, though it probably wasn’t very coherent to begin with. Something about the second case they ever worked on—the Black Lotus assassin and his brilliant, unwilling accomplice of a sister, who’d been leaving SOS messages to float out into the matrix as bright as flares. (Or at least, that’s how Sherlock put it. He’d been the only person to actually read them.) Other images: some breathless moment in darkness when they’d been running over rooftops. Both of them, out in the city together, with the night air cold in their lungs, and Sherlock hadn’t paused once to look disgusted at the clatter and clamour of life all around them, the sounds of the city and its lights and smells, the pockets of warmth from ventilation shafts, swirling colours of adverts projected into the air, overheard snatches of conversation, all that imperfect mess of living data.
John still feels breathless with it.
There had been something else, too.
Sherlock had spoken to him. “I need to go and see a woman about—” something, he’d said. And John had turned to say, “I’ll come with you,” and Sherlock had disappeared before his eyes in a crackle of interference, like an image on archaic videotape. John reached out a hand toward him and his fingers raked through empty air.
Now, he realizes that he’s still reaching out—as though he’s woken expecting someone else to be on the other side of the bed. Fat chance of that. He curls his hand shut and pulls it back into his chest, pressing his lips together.
A woman. The Woman. That had been Irene Adler’s handle—the wily data-thief who’d burned through the London underworld like cold fire and through Sherlock’s mind with the same intensity, and then finally burned out in an anonymous hotel room across town. Flatlined. A trap, the police had said, set by betrayed associates or criminal rivals currently still unknown. Adler had been remarkably good at keeping her face hidden while she was alive—she must’ve had some bloody good plastic surgeons in her pocket—but the DNA results left no doubt.
Sherlock had never actually met Adler face-to-face, but then those kinds of distinctions have never really seemed to matter to him. When he found out she was dead he jacked into the matrix and worked for ten hours straight. He didn’t speak to John—or anyone—for two days after that.
John never quite let on how sick that made him feel. He’s never dared bring it up since, either.
And things were never quite the same, afterwards. The last couple of days, though, he’s caught himself wondering if this is it—the turning-point. If things will start to look up, now they’ve got a case and Sherlock’s asking for his help again, and if one day Sherlock will grab him by the arm and drag him out into the maze of London to do something unbelievably daft at some utterly inappropriate hour of the night, awake and alive to it, the old manic joy back in his eyes.
It hasn’t happened, yet. He probably ought to stop thinking that it might.
That’s why he hates these dreams more than the nightmares. Waking up screaming, he can handle. But when he wakes up hoping—that’s worse. The emptiness that follows. The hollow that makes its home inside his chest.
John groans, and scrubs a hand over his eyes. It’s dawn, greyish and murky, outside his window. No point trying to get any more sleep. He sloughs off his blanket, sets his feet on the floor, and curls up into a sitting position, watching the indent his body has left in the ancient temperfoam slowly fade into nothing.
John hears voices on his way downstairs, and frowns to himself. Bit early for that, surely?
“At least you’ve come to me directly this time,” Sherlock is saying, “much as it must pain you to deny your team another opportunity to display their staggering incompetence.”
“Anderson’s doing much better, thanks for asking.”
“Pity,” says Sherlock, and John clatters down the last few steps and pushes open the door, deciding he’d better join the conversation before damage control becomes post-damage cleanup.
“Morning, Greg,” he says, trying his damnedest to sound halfway alert and cheerful. “Something important come up?”
Despite the mirrored visor that covers his eyes, Lestrade manages to look simultaneously harassed, concerned, and relieved to see him, which John thinks is something of an achievement. “John.” He nods. “You could say that. Take it Sherlock told you about our latest show-off? Desperate to get caught, by the looks of it.”
John can’t help bristling, though he can’t exactly say, I helped with that, without admitting he’s been nicking private records on Sherlock’s behalf. “Yeah,” he says, instead. “Yeah, he did.”
“Some cowboy. If it was meatspace he’d be spraypainting ‘I was ‘ere’ on the wall of every building he broke into. We’ll have him soon enough.”
“This is no cowboy,” Sherlock sniffs. “Though you’re right, he is desperate to get caught. Just not by you.”
“Well, maybe you could make use of the fact it’s your attention he’s so desperate to get, and decipher his latest love letter?”
Sherlock sits down and makes as if to lift the deck into his lap. Then he pauses, and turns to look straight at Lestrade. His gaze is penetrant; disconcerting. “This case has risen to the top of your list of priorities rather fast,” he says. “It’s suddenly important enough for you to have come round in person, when a phone call would surely have sufficed.”
“Oh, you know,” Lestrade says, with a shrug. “I was passing.”
I was worried, John hears in his voice, as clearly as if it were spoken aloud. No doubt Sherlock’s been aware of the real reason for Lestrade’s visit since he saw the car pull up outside—and no doubt that means he’s going to be insufferable for the rest of the morning.
John knows Sherlock and Lestrade have some kind of history, even if they’re not exactly best mates, and he knows better than to try asking Sherlock about it. He also knows that, whatever that history is, it occasionally prompts Lestrade to phone or knock on their door on the flimsiest of pretexts, and to give Sherlock searching, worried looks. Lestrade is also the only person other than himself John’s ever known dare to suggest Sherlock might be ‘overdoing it a bit’—and Sherlock’s even seemed to listen to him, a couple of times. (Okay, ‘listen’ here means ‘switch off the deck for a ten-minute nap and glare evilly at anyone who implies it’s well overdue,’ but this is Sherlock. These things are relative.) That was a while ago, though.
Now, Sherlock just snorts, fishes in the pocket of his dressing gown for a stimulant derm and pushes up his sleeve to press it onto the skin of his inner arm. “Yes, thank you, Lestrade. If your touching display of concern is quite finished, perhaps you’d kindly let me get on with my work?”
John ignores him as pointedly as he possibly can. “Cup of coffee, Greg?”
“Nah, thanks. I’d better get back.” Lestrade turns for the door. “Keep an eye on this insufferable shit, won’t you?”
There’s no heat behind it, but there’s not much amusement, either. John nods mutely, and watches him go.
Another construct from his old life. A bedsit—Spartan: black temperfoam slab on the floor; tangle of computer equipment beside the tiny window; rubbish bin, in need of emptying, in the corner.
He glances down.
A handful of pills.
Then—the room tilts and whirls around him. The world speeds up. His thief has put time and effort into this, accurately recreating the sensations of amphetamine overdose. (And a few other things. Even Sherlock doesn’t remember the exact cocktail; he’d been withdrawing, hard, from puppet-theatre tranks at the time. How could the thief know? Access to his medical records? Mycroft’s private systems will be his next stop.)
Years away, in the front room at 221B Baker Street, his heart races.
A pounding at the door.
“Holmes! Sherlock, I know you’re in there! What the fuck have you—”
The construct folds away into nothingness. Not even the clean, transparent grid of the matrix, and its absence itches inside his skull. Nothingness: a lacuna that demands to be filled, a tenebrous space that would crawl with feardesperationneedeverything, with the irrational, if he faltered for a moment, if he let it in.
Data—however cryptic the form in which it presents itself—is safe. The lack of it leaves gaps for uninvited guests to slip through.
As if in answer, a blossoming. Clinical white. He’s alone in a room—a familiar one, and he’s been half-expecting it. It’s the hospital room (paid for by Mycroft’s money; a vain attempt to make him feel his obligation) he woke up in five years ago, reproduced, as expected, in every particular.
Well, except one. He’s alone, which is an inaccuracy, though it’s also a blessing. No Mycroft to sit beside the bed pursing his lips, sparing one eye with which to fix Sherlock even as the other scans banks of government data, sighing ‘I expected you to have grown out of this by now,’ expressing his sadness, his disappointment, the inconvenience to which this has put him, ad nauseam.
There’s a catheter in the back of his left hand. He pulls it out, admires the resulting pattern of blood droplets that forms on the pristine white sheets. (The satisfaction that accompanies the spoiling of some small thing in this depressing scene instinctive, no less palpable because neither sheets nor blood are real.) He sits up.
Antiquated simstim unit in the corner of the room. Sherlock never used it when he was in here—simulated meatspace has never been his idea of a good time—but now, it draws the eye. And if he’s looking at it, it’s because he is intended to do so. The message will be in there.
False realities within false realities. Again. He is being played with. Someone, he suspects, is trying to make him lose his grip.
The stim segment is uninteresting, the kind of daytime talk and fashion inanity with which Mrs Hudson is so fond of filling her afternoons. The presenter has clearly been nipped and tucked, augmented and diminished, to within an inch of her life, but the sensation of inhabiting unfamiliar flesh draws attention to the sheer corporeality of it all (‘reality’, that’s a misnomer—though, is it? Is sensation any less real because recorded?) and her body feels bulky—inescapably, messily present. Accessing John’s sensorium via the rig has never been anywhere near this unpleasant; the familiarity of it keeps it from demanding so much of his attention. (Though, this morning—but, no. Now is not the time to think about that.) And at least, when he sees through John’s eyes and feels through his skin, he can flip back into the matrix any time he chooses. Here, he has to stay alert—stay trapped—for fear of missing some vital clue.
Simstim is predicated on sensuality, on the physical pleasure of inhabiting an idealised body. Unbidden, words—never heard, only transmitted via the matrix, but indelibly marked on his memory nonetheless—spring to mind. Irene’s words.
“You’d upload, if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Goodness, no. One ought to maintain a healthy regard for the flesh, don’t you think?”
“Enlighten me. What’s ‘healthy’ about decay?”
No. Concentrate. He pushes the conversation from his mind.
The presenter is standing before wide, arched windows, balancing expertly on her skyscraper heels. The pain that must have throbbed in the arches of her feet during recording has been edited out, but the rub of leather against her feet, the liquid slide of her silk blouse, the cool brush of an incoming breeze, are inescapable. Sensations designed to be pleasurable, and most people would surely find them so, but that’s because most people have nothing better to do with their minds. To Sherlock, they’re irritants; nothing more. Delineating the boundaries of flesh, its limitations. Its imprisoning walls.
The host crosses to a plush, overstuffed armchair and sinks into it. Stocking-friction between her thighs as she crosses her legs. Uncomfortable; it makes him want to squirm. (Perhaps, seated before the deck in his flat, he does.) She sits quite still and curves her lips, sticky with gloss, in a placid smile.
The woman seated opposite her is tall, slender, fashionably-dressed, her irises a striking, unnatural iridescent green. Her face: vaguely familiar from advertisements. Former model, then; aware of the inevitably transient nature of success in her field, and now attempting to build a career in fashion design.
“Nerina Lee is with me today,” says the host, “and we’ll be trying out some of the pieces from her Autumn collection shortly. But perhaps you’d like to tell us a little more about it first?”
The model smiles, and sits up straighter. “Well, Connie,” she begins, “this season I’ve been taking inspiration from—”
And she stops, abruptly—or, rather, is stopped. Her face is briefly immobile, mouth gaping around her arrested response—but only briefly. She changes, then.
The light streaming in through the open windows fades, and clouds the dark grey of a dead screen bank ominously in the simulated sky. Skilfully-rendered shadows pool in her eye-sockets. Her outline melts and coalesces into something—someone—else.
A man. His face: obscured in darkness, but for twin sharp, mad glints in the hollows of his eyes. This is his adversary; Sherlock is certain of it.
The shadowed eyes regard him intently for a long moment.
“That was your clue,” it says, at last. Not the voice he’s been anticipating. Soft, faintly accented; Dublin, at a guess. Almost friendly. There’s no VR-villain playacting here, and he reprimands himself inwardly for expecting the obvious. “Better not waste it.” The figure sounds as though it is smiling. “Can you guess who you’re playing for this time?”
Sherlock ignores the taunt. The little opening tableau has already given him his answer: the most resourceful criminal in the country would have difficulty getting to Mycroft—and anyone who knows Sherlock’s life as intimately as this man appears to would doubt the efficacy of a threat against his life as a motivator—so it must be Lestrade.
“I was going to warn you,” the voice continues, “not to think about telling your friends—all three of them—how they’re involved in our little game. But you weren’t going to, were you?” It sounds delighted. “You just have to work it out by yourself. You know they’d never understand.”
“Who are you?” he demands, instead of responding. The presenter’s voice is entirely unlike his own: it’s soft and pleasantly modulated; lacking the necessary force. He swallows and tries again. “What’s the point of all this? It’s a clever enough little game, but I’m losing patience.”
“Oh, come off it,” the voice purrs. “You’ve been waiting for someone like me for years.” Then, as though it’s an afterthought: “You can call me Jim, by the way.”
“And you’d know my mind better than I do, would you?” he asks, scornful, even as he tucks away the name for future reference.
But the construct is beginning to shimmer, to lose integrity. It fades out around him and he is alone in the colourless grid of the matrix, the ghosts of recorded shadow and light lingering as though he has looked too long at the sun.
The matrix, shadowless and laboratory-clean; the home his mind deserves. To enter it is to burn away the mess of self; the disabling weaknesses of the body; the unpredictable, distracting wash of hormone and emotion. Here, he is reduced—but no, that’s altogether the wrong word. Here, he is freed. Pared down to essentials, to the bare wiring that keeps consciousness alive, and simultaneously allowed to expand far, far past the limits of sight and sense. The city—the whole world—spreads itself out before him, laid open in clear, clean lines of data. Seen both as through the lens of a microscope, and as from high orbit. An infinity of puzzles for him to solve, each salient detail lighting up for him until the entirety of the picture becomes clear, photic pointillism invisible to lesser minds.
He could live here forever, never bored—and if the longing that thought brings is accompanied by a throb of inexplicable sorrow (John), or a second’s uncertainty, it is soon quashed.
Here, there is no reason for him to be limited by form. Here, he has tentacles.
‘Jim’, whoever he may be, is about to become their search-object.
Examining Mycroft’s private systems has yielded nothing; nor has investigating the sites of other recent major security breaches. ‘Jim’ is good at covering his tracks. Still. Sherlock has other methods. In the matrix, he need never be inconvenienced by the presence of others—by the pressing-in of their needs, their demands, their half-awake minds. But when he wishes to be, he is endlessly connected.
The Wig (real name: Josh Wiggins; location: Tower Hamlets) is a slum neophyte; what common parlance, with its borrowed Sprawl neologisms, would term a hotdogger. Far too small-time to come to the attention of corporate security systems. The Wig is talented, and his handle might one day be well-known in underworld circles, but for now, he’s more interested in impressing his friends than in serious data-theft.
And he has a lot of friends. Every slum kid with access to a deck fancies him or herself a criminal legend, known throughout London and Tokyo and the Sprawl. There’s little else for bored teenagers in what are euphemistically termed the ‘underprivileged boroughs’ to do. It’s the work of a moment to fire off a message intimating serious reward for anybody able to provide information on the mysterious ‘Jim’ or on any criminal activity more unusual, more audacious, than the norm. The criminal up-and-comers of the city are set up to feed Sherlock’s hard drive, functioning as his eyes and ears. There’ll be a steady stream of data for him to sift through, soon.
For now, though, he has a fashion show to watch.
John drinks his coffee and munches on a nutrient bar while Sherlock sits motionless on the other side of the living room. He switches on the inbuilt wall screen to glance through the morning headlines. Nothing on the mysterious data-thefts, but that’s not surprising; both the cops and the corporations are bound to want this as hush-hush as possible right now. There’s a whole segment on some Japanese idol’s latest virtual ‘tour’, the entertainment correspondent burbling interminably about stunning new advances in immersive broadcast technology, and he raises his eyebrows, opens his mouth to remark, “This is news?” before remembering that nobody’s listening.
He switches off. He showers, dresses, drops back into his armchair and flicks through the channels, but he can’t sit still. He eyes the simstim unit, but doubts there’s anything interesting on. He can distract himself with it, sometimes, but other times, the segments feel washed-out and dull in comparison to the real, to the life he and Sherlock have. Used to have. He suspects that today is one of those times. The silence itches under his skin.
He contemplates ringing Sarah to see if there are any extra shifts at the clinic he can pick up, or if she just fancies meeting up for some lunch. Cheap food and overpriced coffee might not be as exciting as chasing after criminals with Sherlock, but at least he’d have someone to talk to.
The time display is showing 11:13 when Sherlock finally jacks out. But all he says to John is, “Daytime fashion simstim segment. Presenter named Connie. What channel?”
“Um, two eleven, I think.” John says, and then his brain catches up with the conversation and registers, what the fuck? “Wait, you want to watch the Connie Prince show? What’s that got to do with anything?”
Sherlock looks at him with the ghost of a glint in his eyes, but they light on him only for a second, their focus clearly far away. “I’m about to find out,” he says, and presses the stim unit’s trodes onto his forehead.
John shakes his head, and calls Sarah.
On his way out of the flat, John notices a black car—German, but modelled after the old Bentleys—idling near the pavement opposite. The woman who tailed them the other night is sitting in the back, window wound down, her mirrored implants reflecting the Baker Street traffic. Slightly incongruous in the daylight—darkened alleys seem more like her natural habitat—but still not really someone whose notice John wants to court. She glances once in his direction, registers his presence, but then looks away again, apparently dismissing him as an irrelevance. The car makes no move to follow him. It’s obviously Sherlock she’s watching for.
Frankly, he doesn’t know why Mycroft bothers. It’s not as though Sherlock ever leaves the flat unless he has to, these days.
Still, he can’t help glancing up at their front window himself, just the once. There’s no sign of life. He shrugs, and continues down the street.
Chapter 4
