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  SOUL JACKER – SOUL JACKER 1

  Michael John Grist

  2364. A terrified girl flees a brutal slumlord…

  It's been a long time since Ritry risked his sanity on a deep-brain Soul-jack. Once renowned for hacking the most lethal minds, now he peddles cheap memory implants on the neon-lit slums of the Arctic Circle - staying out of trouble, mostly.

  Then a terrified girl bolts into his jack-site, seeking a unique brain-hack to escape Don Zachary, the brutal slumlord. Ritry's no hero, but he won't stand by while another innocent dies.

  Yet the Don does not forgive. Hounded from his quiet life, Ritry flees into the forgotten ruins of the old world, only to find a far crueler predator lying in wait, one with a dark taste for living Souls - plunging Ritry into one last desperate jack with the Souls of all humanity on the line…

  "Superb - a Fantastic Voyage into the soul. Grist has produced a taut, clever cyberthriller that messes with your mind. Blending hard science, metaphysics and high-octane action, SoulJacker had me gripped from the start. If you're a fan of Stephenson and Gibson, and you love interweaving narratives that keep you guessing, you must read Soul Jacker." - Pat Mills, creator of 2000AD featuring Judge Dredd.

  THE COMPLETE SOUL JACKER TRILOGY

  Soul Jacker (Book 1)

  Soul Breaker (Book 2)

  Soul Killer (Book 3)

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  Read an excerpt of book 2 Soul Breaker at the back.

  For SY

  CONTENTS

  RITRY GOLIGH

  ME

  EXTRAS

  Author's Note

  Soul Breaker (Book 2) Excerpt

  About the Author

  Glossary

  RITRY GOLIGH

  1. SOUL JACKER

  The needle enters Mei-An's eye socket smoothly, nestling beside her artificially whitened eyeball and passing back into her brain. She barely flinches, though I know it's uncomfortable as hell.

  If not for the hunted look on her face she'd be remarkably pretty; a late twenties meta-Asiat with deep black hair and face-framing bangs to die for. Dressed in a strawberry-red gho that clings to the curves of her body, she stands out against the jack-room's muted gray walls like an aneurysm.

  And she's terrified.

  I offer my best calming smile and steadily depress the syringe plunger, injecting the silvery engram fluid into her head; a bespoke memory patch of language and vocational skills, enough to build a new identity beyond the wall. I draw the needle gently out then lean back, giving her time to blink away the discomfort.

  "How do you feel?" I ask.

  "It hurts," she says, in the clipped tones of a Calico girl. As her mouth opens I see the black tattoo on her tongue: DZ, the brand-mark of Don Zachary, brutal mob boss of the Skulks. "Like there's an ice tsunami in my head."

  I nod and watch her, sitting there on the input tray of the EMR. She's too young to remember the big waves, when they carried the last dregs of Arctic ice crashing against Calico's tsunami wall. Late twenties and maybe ten years my junior, but clearly no innocent. You don't get Don Zachary's brand and stay innocent for long.

  A silvery tear beads from her darting eye and I dab it away with a surgical cloth. "Let them settle for a few moments," I say, "then we'll jack in."

  As I turn to go, she reaches out and takes my hand in her cold, hard fingers. "He may come looking for me."

  I smile. Of course I know that. By all accounts Don Zachary's a bastard. "Just try to be calm."

  I leave her, exiting the barren gray jack-room to stand in the polished steel corridor outside, alongside my assistant Carrolla. He's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I think he must have had marine training, though he never fought in the Arctic War.

  He raises an eyebrow, and I know what he's thinking. It was a calm night until Mei-An came in: a couple of drunks asking for transient joy jacks, a freighterman looking to erase a bad trip, followed by the prospect of hitting the bars soon, and now this? We're tampering with Don Zachary's property, and that puts the crosshairs squarely on us.

  "She wants out," I say, "we can do that much."

  Carrolla grunts. "I heard the Don crucified the last guy who crossed him. Actually nailed him to the damn tsunami wall and left him to rot. Nobody came to help. Nobody took him down. Does that sound like a good time to you, Rit?"

  I shrug. There are no shortage of legends about the Don. "I'm not turning her away."

  "You damn well should."

  "Should I?" I look at him. "You saw the breaks. Her cheekbones are a work of art, how many times they've been surgically reset. We let her go now, she's dead. You may as well go drown her in the ocean yourself; it'd be a kinder way to die."

  "She made her bed," Carrolla protests, "let her lie in it alone."

  I just keep looking at him. He's a good guy, he has my back in a pinch, but he's not ruthless enough for this, though he thinks he is. Let one innocent die and it'll break him in ways he doesn't yet understand. The War made criminals of us all.

  "I can't," I say.

  Carrolla stares at me and I stare back, equally stubborn. So this is our impasse, where I always draw the line. I don't live for much, and I buckle to the Don when I have to, but I won't stand in the way of someone who just wants to survive.

  "Don-goddamned-Zachary," Carrolla mutters eventually under his breath, giving in. "He'll pull your face right off."

  I let that pass unremarked, and we stand quietly for a moment longer. In Mei-An's brain the engram will be spreading, making connections to her existing Soul; all the unique combinations of memory, experience, emotion and chemicals that make her who she is. The engram will rewrite portions of that architecture as it teaches language and skills to help her find work. It could be a passport to a new life away from the fleshpits of the Don.

  I'm helping her, I think.

  "I need you tight on me for this," I say into the quiet. "It's a deeper jack than usual."

  Carrolla nods sharply, like a marine. He's got discipline, I'll give him that.

  After a few minutes we head back into the jack-room together. Mei-An is sitting there like a dab of milk on the EMR machine's input tray, shivering slightly. The machine's old and blocky lines don't match her at all; this child of Calico's privilege, genetically designed within an inch of her life.

  Carrolla tosses her a lazy smile then takes up position at the control panel. I sit on the stool in front of Mei-An and look into her wide, hunted eyes. I offer my hand and she takes it. It's good to get the skinship started in small ways, to start our systems aligning.

  "There are serious risks to your Soul," I say, for the second time since she came in. I like to be certain. "Potential damage to your memory, to your wits, to your personality. I'm good at what I do but there's always a risk. I need to hear you say you're sure."

  She nods swiftly. "I'm sure. I don't have a choice."

  I nod. Who amongst us does? "Lie down on your side, facing me."

  She does. I climb onto the tray and lie beside her.

  "It'll be fine," I say. "Carrolla."

  Carrolla pushes the button to fire up the EMR; Electro-Magnetic Resonance imager. Once a piece of medical equipment designed for mapping the brain, to detect cancer, tumors and other abnormalities before they manifested outward, the EMR is now the primary tool of the Soul Jacker. Essentially an elephant-sized donut of metal and plastic tipped on its side, it contains powerful imaging electromagnets that whir within the ring, focused on the tray inside the donut hole, where the Soul Jacker and his patient lie together.

  I squeeze Mei-An's hand as the electromagnets start to rev and thump, building a soupy kind of static between us, like the thickness in th
e air before a storm.

  thump thump

  thump thump

  The sound grows louder and the input tray jerks into motion, drawing us into the machine's hollow heart. Like passing through the drumbeat curtain of a waterfall, the electrostatic pummels us as we slide in, until we are surrounded by the EMR's off-white bulk. The thumping of the magnets becomes thunderous and tides of electromagnetism wash out to fill the spaces between us with a cold, fluid medium. It takes years to learn how to navigate this flow, years more to jack a mind across it, but to actually jack and rewrite a Soul?

  You have to be crazy.

  I narrow my eyes and defocus my mind, pulling out of my own Soul and reaching out to navigate the flow between us. Dimly at first, half with my eyes and half with my mind, I glimpse the outline of Mei-An's unique Soul transposed atop her face in a hazy heatmap. Her fears, joys, memories and dreams of a better future light up bright like interweaving passageways in an endlessly overlapping maze.

  I push further out, building an invisible bridge of resonance between us with my force of will alone. Across this bridge I'll pass into the outer reaches of her mind, to the spot where I injected the silvery engram. I can feel that the area's inflamed, as expected with any injection, but that's not all.

  There are gnaw marks at the engram's edge, and a steady creeping corruption setting. That's unusual; too fast, too unlikely, but it can only mean-

  "Shit!"

  Carrolla's shout echoes tinnily through the electrostatic medium, followed by a red flash splashing down like blood in the water. Next I feel it, and I have to tamp down the inclination to panic because this jack just got real.

  The Lag is here.

  The Lag is the brain's natural mental immunity, present in every living mind, its sole purpose to repel any invasive presence. Here in this outer ocean of thought it comes like a goddamn shark, a great metaphysical gray beast ready to savage anything that comes close.

  It's too fast. It sees me and rears back from its feeding ground at the engram before I can hide, coming both barrels right for me and ready to kill.

  "Her cells are starting to cook!" Carrolla calls from far away. "Her whole brain's swelling up. Get out of there, Rit!"

  I can't though, not with the engram still inside her like bloody chum to the Lag. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her Soul away just to get the foreign matter out, and she'll come out deranged. I'm not doing that again.

  "Look at me, Mei-An," I say, gazing into her wide, terrified eyes through the waves even as the extended part of me darts to evade the Lag's massive jaws. I can only do this for moments. "Look into my eyes, that's it."

  She tries to nod but now she's losing motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky.

  "Stay calm," I tell her, "try not to fight," then I crank the wavelength of my thoughts all the way down to match hers, initiating an invasive jack.

  A rush of thought-data pummels me at once; hard bubbles rising through the magnetic flow that represent the inputs and outputs of billions of individual brain cells. I swim roughly against the barrage, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode and now there's only one hope: get to the core.

  A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Arctic Ocean in tsunami as her stress levels spike, the cell firing rate shoots up, and the engram area flips belly up as unconsciousness dawns…

  "Damn it, Rit, she's slipping," Carrolla calls faintly from above.

  I jack deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by organic structures like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away. I pass beyond the confines of brain cells and structure, through the outer crust and into the internal realm where the real world is forgotten and my mind truly meets hers.

  The Molten Core.

  At once lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am most certainly an invader, suspended like a sinking body in a churning magma tide. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.

  I peer through the boiling heat. Nearby the Lag is closing in. This deep in it has transformed into a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows, but I'm also the only thing that can save Mei-An's Soul.

  Everything is to play for now.

  I give the command and my sublavic ship forms around me, the Bathyscaphe, a submersible built for jacking through lava in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with three layers of heat-proof brick cladding. Within its belly my seven crew members burn into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln, and my consciousness splits evenly across them. As captain I send each part of myself to their posts throughout the ship: at the engines, manning the periscope, setting a course for Mei-An's Solid Core.

  The engine-screw churns the ship forward, driving us into bubbles of memory that burst over the periscope and leave behind hints of who this girl is. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive bar beside a guy with a sternum piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon Skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don. One in particular stands out as he punches her in the face, a guy with a blunt nose and blank gray eyes. I know him but can't place the name.

  The Lag snaps after me with ravenous jaws, and I launch a few sacrificial pieces of my own Soul as torpedoes to slake its hunger: the memory of my walk through the park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me, Arcloberry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a hungry worm, after all, and every bit of Soul is good for food.

  My sublavic ship powers ahead with the Lag chasing behind, until in moments I hear the dark boundary line of the Solid Core coming near through sonar, a heartbeat spreading through the magma with a steady-

  thump thump

  thump thump

  -that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering Mei-An's burning mental architecture: the pattern of her mother's pulse.

  The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in the infant brain, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the mind like soft clay. It is the foundation all brains are built upon, with uniquely healing properties, stored in the heart of the Solid Core.

  No one has ever entered a Solid Core and lived. The risks that far inside are massive, where the Lag is god and all the pathways are an endlessly shifting labyrinth. I couldn't get in if I tried, but thankfully I don't need to; I'm close enough now to tap the pulse like a keg.

  Tuning forks punch out through the ship's brick cladding and capture the pattern as it resonates through the magma. The forks melt in seconds but I get what I've come for, then turn the ship around and amplify the pulse outward by vibrating the hull. The Lag instantly quiets under this gentle lullaby from the womb, and I propel my ship away from its huge body with the pulse rippling out around me, bathing Mei-An's mind with this healing balm like a key slotting into a lock.

  It works, and I feel her stress levels calming through the flow of lava. I push my consciousness a few layers deeper, all the way into the realm of my ship's conning tower, into the mind of the captain standing at the periscope. Through the periscope lens I see more thoughts popping ahead; glimpses of her drugged-up latter days in the company of her blunt-nosed boyfriend. I recognize him now, one of the Don's sons who comes around sometimes to take his father's tax. He's an abusive shit who methodically beats the will out of her. The memories are calmer now, as the panic of the Lag's immune rejection stills.

  thump thump, thump thump

  The Lag is still out there though, tracking me sleepily through the lava. I'm still an invader, and the job isn't over. If I don'
t do something it will eventually scrub the engram, so I head to the tail end of the optic nerve and massage the pulse around the engram's edge, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. The pulse cools the inflamed cells and pets the Lag on the head like a trusty old dog.

  I sigh with metaphoric relief.

  "Can I have my Arcloberry juice box back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the magma. I remember the memory exists because I only gave the emotional content, not the frame, but the Lag is mute on its refund policy.

  "My walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."

  It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more than this in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?

  Dammit. I pull outward, and my mind and the sublavic ship merge back into one as my thoughts suck free of Mei-An's Molten Core. I rush back through the bubbling outer soup of data as my consciousness disengages, until I'm fully back in my own head and panting hard, lying in the decelerating thump thump of the EMR machine.

  Mei-An is lying in front of me, her eyes now closed and breathing deeply. The job is done.

  2. MEI-AN

  The tray engages and we slide out of the hollow EMR machine together, into the plain gray of the jack-room. It's painted gray for just this moment, to avoid any confusing stimulus to a disoriented brain.

  "Strong work, Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.

  It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.