Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

to the CIA were working for the CIA.
    But they still had her down as an asset, the bastards, after
all those years and changes.
    And the girl with pink hair had been on the Staten Island
ferry, too. She never did figure that out, and in the end put it
down to coincidence.)
     
    Jason passed her the joint, and they smoked it together as
they ambled down the steep, rocky path through neglected
olive-trees to the foot of the hill, where they’d left
their hired jeep. The dingy litde settlement there had consisted
of newly built concrete houses, and a few of the stolen stone
houses in the first street of the long-emptied Greek town. All of
them had been gutted years ago, the Turkish families living there
slaughtered by Greek partisans in the last war. The
blue-and-white ceramic eyes – for good luck, against the
evil eye – above the doors were cracked, the timbers
blackened. Myra ground the roach into charcoal ashes that still
lay inchesdeep. She didn’t feel high, just focused, her
sight enhanced as if by a VR overlay. She could see why
this land was worth fighting over.
    Jason got into the driver’s seat as Myra climbed in the
other side. He looked at her sympathetically, as though
half-sorry for having brought her here.
    ‘Sometimes God is just,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah. In a very Old Testament way.’
    Jason started up the engine and swung the jeep around on to
the narrow road to Hisaronu. The road climbed, scraping trees,
edging precipices. Pine and rock and dry gullies – it was
like a hot day in Scodand. Myra remembered a day with David Reid,
by a river between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, that had felt just
like this. He had talked about depopulation and forced migration
in biblical terms as well, she recalled.
    ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,’ she heard
herself say.
    ‘What?’
    ‘That thing from the Bible. You know, about the king of
Babylon? „Thou art weighed in the balances, and found
wanting.“ ‘
    ‘I’m aware of the source,’Jason said,
keeping his eyes on the road. ‘It’s the relevance
that kind of escapes me.’
    ‘It’s the way I feel,’ Myra said. She stuck
her hand in the air above the windscreen, feeling the cool rush
between her fingers.
    ‘That’s how you feel about yourself? That’s
bad.’
    ‘No,’ she told him. ‘About the fucking world.’
    ‘That’s worse.’
    She laughed, her spirits lifting.
    ‘Anyway,’ Jason went on, ‘it’s just
the rejuve talking. People get like that.’
    ‘You would know, huh?’
    ‘Not personally. With me, it’s just stabilising,
right? With you -’ he smirked sidelong at her ‘
– it’s got a lot of work to do.’
    Thanks.’
    ‘It makes you feel strange. Euphoric and
judgemental.’
    ‘Yeah, that’s me all right!’
    It was the fifth day since she’d swallowed the surgery.
The nanomachines had differentiated and proliferated inside her,
spreading out through her circulation like an army of sappers,
tearing down and rebuilding. She felt their waste heat like a
fever, burning her up. Her moods swung from normal to high, she
didn’t have depressions any more, it was like a biological
Keynesianism, except that in the long run she was not going to be
dead. She was not immortal, not really – who could tell?
The best guess was centuries and in that time something else
would come along – but she felt immortal, she felt like
people did in their twenties before their cells started running
down and their neurons began to die, no wonder she could remember
the seventies so vividly, no wonder she was getting so
arrogant!
    Sex with Jason had been a foregone conclusion, from about the
second she saw him. He was an imperialist agent, a strategic
enemy even if a tactical ally, and she didn’t care, she
wanted to seduce him and subvert him herself, turn tricks learned
in a lifetime that would curl his toes and grey his dark-copper
hair. If he had any inhibitions or revulsion from her still-aged
body they had been dissolved in the first evening’s first
bottle of raki. She’d sucked him rigid, fucked him raw,
taught him much and told him little.
    The little she told him was about Georgi, and the
circumstances of Georgi’s death. For reasons which Jason
didn’t spell out, but which Myra suspectedhad ‘Agency
asset – poss future use?’ scribbled in their margins,
the CIA was conducting its own investigation into that death
which had been so de-niably convenient for