Ecko Rising

Before it resealed, Ecko was through it.

* * *

One hand.

Two.

Flattened by the wind and hammered by the driving, freezing rain, Ecko clung to the edge of the roof.

The flexiweight in the cloak hem kept it from tangling his legs but its folds billowed and flapped as if threatening to drag him loose. His hands strained to hold him – his reinforced skin didn’t cover his fingertips and they stung with pain on the broken stone.

Ecko’s Tech – he called her “Mom” – had fashioned him many things. Laying a complex system of wiring into the motor nerves of his hands, she’d turned his fingers into inhumanly accurate callipers. Arrayed with tactile sensors, his bare fingertips could tell him the location of wiring in a wall, the movement of tumblers in a lock, the exact moment the breath stopped in someone’s throat...

But they also hurt like bastards if anything damaged them. He could feel all of it: every lump, every splinter, every crack, every chip and fragment of the broken wall. He could have mapped the destruction to the last half nanometre – the pain etched the landscape of the stonework into the blood on his fingertips.

His resolve set like cold steel, Ecko swung sideways along the roof’s edge – away from the can’s target arc. His jaw jumped with the hurt of every handhold, but he kept his oculars focused on the dirty, pitted ferrocrete before him. He closed his ears to the demented yowl of the wind, ignored the rain as it battered into his flesh. If he fell...

...He was playing Bogeyman, playing Bogeyman for real. Bogeyman didn’t mess up – and he didn’t fall off the fucking wall. For Bogeyman to end up as Pavement Pizza was inconceivable.

He sniggered like the first sign of panic.

One hand then two.

His feet swung loose, billowing uselessly as if his legs were broken. He could get no purchase on the slippery glass. After another metre, the pain in his fingertips was sparking stars across his vision. His hands were cramping, his arms and shoulders shuddering with strain. As the hurt increased, his fingers lied to him. A whole chunk of wall came away under his grip and he dangled precariously from one hand, the wind blinding him with his cloak hood.

For chrissakes, he thought to himself, get a fucking grip.

He sniggered aloud – then strangled it before it rose to a scream.

Desperate fear gave him strength. With a simian swing, he secured the second handhold and hung there, sick with relief. He dared not raise his head above the lip of the wall – that fucking can would blow it clean off.

Another two metres and he’d reach the corner.

* * *

Ecko’s briefing had covered only the corporate basics – approach, building security, office space – it hadn’t listed the contents of Grey’s lab. That shit was target numero uno on the list of stuff Ecko had to recon.

Gotcha!

Behind him, the door clanged shut and sealed with a slight hiss. Oblivious to the additional presence, Grey and Salva headed swiftly away across the gloom.

Leaving Ecko crouched at the bottommost edge of a nightmare cavern.

He’d been expecting the usual – some elaborate medical set-up. Computers, cryogenics, glass tubing, dry ice, some twisted lab assistant with genetics issues... The span of the entire building and four floors in height, this place had none of these things.

It looked more like a prison.

In the moment of confusion, he paused to check for security – just scanning the gloom as though nothing was wrong.

And then he realised what he’d found.

It left him breathless – staring above and around him in a choking swell of awe, fear and scorn – a rising, throat-closing claustrophobia that all but had him scrabbling at the door.

Down each long wall, stacked like crates and stretching into the gloom, there were chambers. The layout was utterly familiar – and terrifying in its banality. Now utilised by every major corporation to house its staff, these were bog standard, completely recognisable Human Resource Containers – commonplace city habitation, sold on by Pilgrim to the big corporations. They were marketed as “bolt-holes” to those that lived in them – known as “shit- holes” to those that managed not to. Each had a bed, a cupboard, a toilet, a fridge and a console loaded with The World of Anywhere-But-Here... Yeah, each one had everything the mindless worker drone needed.

Grey and Salva had purposefully vanished. Ecko didn’t care. Hunched under the weight of the room, he stared from door to door to door, his lungs filling with repulsion and horror. This was social perfection – pure order. This was what Pilgrim strived for, this was how they’d become the single most powerful corporation in the world. They’d delivered a quiescent, contented population, a totally peaceful and crime-free society.

Yeah right. What they’d delivered was fifty million little plastic bottles labelled “Mood Stabiliser”.

Instant contentment. Happiness in tablet form.

Yeah, it may as well have been fucking cryogenics, Ecko reckoned. At least the bastards shut in those didn’t have to work a nine-to-six.

The place stank like a week of backed-up shit. As Ecko remembered to breathe, the stink was a sharp punch in the nose. He found the room smelled of piss, unwashed skin, rotting food... It reeked like a bunch of junkies had been using it as crash space.

Ecko quelled his anger and checked again for the room’s security. Then, as wary as a black-eyed rodent, he moved to the door of the first shit-hole.

He’d had a horrible fucking idea he knew what was coming.

* * *

At last, Ecko reached the corner of the building.

Feeling the openness of the sky to his side, he hung there for a moment, willing himself to continue. His blood screamed louder than the wind in his ears.

As he eased precariously round the angle, the weather hit him like a train and he found himself scrabbling frantically for a foothold. From being plastered to his back, his cloak became a parachute, pulling at his throat, hips and elbows – its loose folds inflated and the wind shrilled through carefully seamed rents.

For an instant, it nearly ripped him clean off the side of the building.

The thing was a mass of folds and slits and loose ends of fabric... all now trying to pull him loose. Ecko twisted his back to the wind and the thing deflated like a dying animal.

His fingertips were slippery, leaving bloodstains; he could feel the palms of his hands oozing with stickiness. He didn’t dare release a hand to move onwards and the cloak was too complicated to release, so he hung, pain, fear and savage resolve all yammering for attention in his head.

Whatever you do, he told himself, don’t fucking look down.

Fucking Collator and his fucking odds, fucking Lugan and his fucking plans. You get in, you get the data stick, you get out... Yeah, right – more like, you get in, you get screwed, you end up target practise for a Takeshimi tin can that’s not even supposed to be here...

His feet slipped and skidded; his arms and fingers cramped like he’d never uncurl them. The cloak still tugged at him. He shook the cowl from his head and the wind slammed into his cheek.

The temperature was dropping – the rain was turning to sleet.

With an effort that nearly broke him, he swung his weight into motion once more – one hand then two, just a little further...

* * *

The first shit-hole wasn’t locked.