Hive Monkey (2 page)

The sun went behind a cloud.

“No.” William sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. It was a nervous reflex. “Not at all. Not for ages. I’m just a bit groggy today. A cold, that’s all.”

He heard Max sigh. “Just make sure that first draft hits my inbox by Wednesday morning, or we’re going to have words, you understand? Harsh words. You’re in the last chance saloon, buddy, and it’s high time to shit, or get off the—”

William opened his hand, and let the phone fall. It tumbled end-over-end and hit the water. A small splash, some ripples, and it was gone.

“Goodbye, Max.”
Whisper your clichés to the drowned sailors and scuttling crabs at the bottom of the sea.

William turned up the collar of his coat. The wool felt scratchy against his beard. Hands in pockets, he walked back, past the lock gates, and along the apartment-lined edge of the marina, heading home to where his laptop waited, the cursor blinking hopelessly on the first blank white page of his unwritten book.

Portishead was a coastal dormitory town in South West England, twenty minutes drive from the city of Bristol. It had a high street, shops, and a drive-through McDonald’s. The town’s marina had once been an industrial dockyard serving a coal-fired power station. Now, only the stone quay remained. The rest had been transformed in the early decades of the century. The bustling railway sidings had given way to cafés and a leisure centre, the cranes to waterfront apartments and a primary school. The dock itself had been retrofitted as a marina and, instead of the rusty cargo ships of old, now housed a flotilla of private yachts and pleasure boats. The rigging on their masts rattled in the wind; little turbine blades spun on their cabin roofs; and Union Jacks and French Tricolours flapped from their sterns.

William walked to the end of the quayside and out onto the road. Yellow leaves swirled from the trees and skittered around his feet. His latest apartment, which felt dank, lifeless and suffocating even on the sunniest of days, lay on the other side of the road, in a block overlooking a supermarket car park. In the summer, with the windows open, all he could hear was the rattle and crash of shopping trolleys and the slam of car doors.

Standing at the kerb, trying to summon the energy to cross the road and climb the stairs, he saw one of his neighbours emerge from the building. She was on her way to work, car keys in one hand and briefcase in the other, a triangle of toast clamped between her teeth. He didn’t know her name, but gathered she was a nurse, working shifts at one of the local hospitals. They’d passed in the corridor a couple of times, but only ever exchanged superficial pleasantries.

Maybe I should go into town,
he thought.
I could call in on Sparky, and pick up a couple of wraps to see me through the weekend.
Sparky was his dealer, and William had been buying cheap amphetamines, or ‘cooking speed’, from him for over a year now. For a moment he wondered if a few hits of the powder would get him going, fire up the old synapses and get the words crackling out onto the page.

He slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out his door key.

No,
he told himself.
Sparky’s the last person you need to be around. You’ve spent the last four days wired out of your damn mind, and you’ve produced nothing, not one word. The sooner you straighten up and start writing, the sooner you’ll have something to give to Max. And if you don’t get started soon, you’ll have to pay back the advance. And you can’t, because you’ve spent it already. You’ve frittered it away on takeaways and whiskey, and drugs and cigarettes.

His neighbour crossed the street, and smiled around the toast as she passed him. The sun emerged again, and he blinked up at it, shading his sleep-deprived eyes from its golden light.

A
ND THAT’S WHEN
the first shot rang out.

He heard a noise like a car backfiring, and something smacked into the wall of the leisure centre. At first, he didn’t know what had happened—a spark of metal on brick, a puff of dust. Stupidly, he thought somebody had thrown a stone. Then he saw the car parked against the opposite kerb. The driver’s window was down, and an inhuman face snarled at him from beneath a white fedora. He saw an ape-like creature with a wide mouth and a bulbous nose, and a gun held in its fist. Half man and half beast, it looked like some sort of caveman, and he frowned at it, sure his eyes deceived him. Then the gun barrel puffed, and a bullet whined past his face. Instinctively, he cowered back, covering his chest and stomach with his hands. His body felt huge, exposed and vulnerable. He turned his shoulder away from the car. Every muscle cringed in anticipation, braced for the impact of the next shot.

But the next shot never came. Instead, the car exploded.

For an instant, William’s world turned to light and noise. He felt the heat of the blast on his hands and face. His ears popped as he was thrown off his feet.

He hit the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from his body, and lay gasping, looking up at the trees. Leaves whirled down around him like snow. Car alarms shrilled. The air stank of the napalm tang of burning petrol. Across the street, the force of the explosion had shattered all the windows on the front of the apartment block. Pedestrians shouted and screamed. The girl with the briefcase crouched next to him. Her hair was a mess, and her jacket was ripped. She had a gash across one cheek like a ragged fingernail scratch. She asked him something, but he couldn’t hear what she said. His ears were still recovering.

“Are you okay?” she repeated.

He swallowed. His throat and mouth were dry. “I don’t know.” His hands and face stung where shrapnel had nicked and scratched them. He eased an inch-long splinter of glass from the back of his hand, and let it fall onto the pavement.

“That man in the car.” She spoke fast, gabbling with shock. “He had a gun. He was shooting at you.”

William closed his eyes.

“Yes.”

“But why? Why was he doing that?”

He tried to move, and winced at the pain in his back. He’d played football in high school, back in Ohio, and knew what it felt like to be flattened by a quarterback twice his size.

“I don’t know. Is he—?”

She glanced at the tangled wreck.

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“How did you make his car blow up like that?”

“Me?” William felt the world roll giddily around his head. His brain hadn’t caught up yet, hadn’t fully processed what had happened. He elbowed himself up into a sitting position. “I didn’t do anything. How could I?”

The girl turned wide eyes to the black, greasy smoke belching up from the car’s gutted shell.

“Well,
somebody
certainly did.”

“It wasn’t me.”

Something popped in the wreckage, and they both flinched.

“Come on,” his neighbour said. “I think we’d better move.”

CHAPTER TWO

CITY LIGHTS

“W
HO ARE YOU
calling foul-mouthed, you twat?”

The tabloid journalist took a step back, brandishing his press ID like a shield. They were in the
Tereshkova
’s main passenger lounge, aft of the airship’s bridge.

“N-not me,” he stammered. “
I
know what you’re like.”

Ack-Ack Macaque’s leatherflight jacket creaked as he pushed up from his barstool.

“Then what are you saying?” The monkey rubbed the patch covering the socket that had once housed his left eye. He’d done a handful of interviews over the past twelve months, and hadn’t enjoyed any of them. And now here was this clown, bothering him when he was trying to enjoy a quiet cigar.

“You’re a national hero in the Commonwealth,” the man said. The name ‘Nick Dean’ was printed beneath his photo. “But some parts of the British Press have criticised you as a poor role model for children.”

Ack-Ack Macaque stood up straight. “Fuck them.” He slapped the counter. “I stopped a nuclear war, what more do they want?”

Dean pocketed his card. A tiny camera drone hovered above his right shoulder like a tame dragonfly. “They say you drink, swear and smoke too much, and you play with guns.”

“I don’t play with guns.”

“Yes, you do. You’re fiddling with one right now.”

Ack-Ack Macaque snatched his fingers away from his holster, and coughed.

“What can I say? When you’ve got a massive pair of Colts strapped to your hips, every problem coming your way looks like something that needs the shit shooting out of it.”

“And that’s why you were thrown out of the Plaza Hotel in New York, wasn’t it?”

He bristled. “I wasn’t thrown out. They simply asked me to leave.”

“The neighbours complained about the smell. And the ricochets.”

Ack-Ack Macaque grinned, exposing his yellow canines. “Hey, that wasn’t my fault. The clock radio startled me.”

“And so you blew it to bits?”

“When I left, they were still picking bits of plastic from the walls and ceiling.”

Dean leant forward. “The
New York Times
said that if Nobel Prizes were given out for smoking cigars and wrecking stuff, you’d be top of the list.”

“I suppose.” Ack-Ack Macaque looked around the lounge. They were alone apart from the barman and a guy in a white suit. “Now, how about you fuck off and leave me in peace?”

Ignoring him, Dean pulled out an electronic notepad and moved his finger down to the next question on his list.

“We’re currently approaching an airfield on the outskirts of Bristol,” he read aloud. “This is the first time you’ve returned to the UK since last winter, when you helped overthrow the previous political regime. What have you being doing with yourself since then?”

Ack-Ack Macaque tapped his knuckles against the bar. “Lying on tropical beaches,” he muttered. “Drinking cocktails, and taking pot shots at jet skis.”

Dean frowned at him. He wanted a proper interview. “What have you
really
been doing?”

Ack-Ack Macaque took a deep breath, and made an effort not to plant a fist in the guy’s stupid face.
May as well get this over with,
he thought.
Then maybe the bastards will leave me alone.

“Well,” he said, trying to force some enthusiasm into his tone, “I’ve been working as a pilot.”

“Here on the
Tereshkova
?”

“Yes, here on the
Tereshkova
. We’ve been all over the North Atlantic. Middle America and the Caribbean; the East Coast of the United States; Newfoundland, and the North Polar Ocean.”

Dean’s finger tapped the notebook’s screen. “The events of last year thrust you into the limelight. You went from being a cult figure in a computer game to being a real life celebrity. Everybody wanted to interview you. There was even talk of a TV series. Why’d you turn your back on all of that?”

“I’m not cut out for fame.”

“You’d rather be a humble pilot?”

Ack-Ack Macaque caught hold of his tail and began grooming it, picking bits of fluff and lint from the hairs at the end. At a table across the room, the guy in the white suit sipped his coffee and pretended not to listen.

“For now. While I figure out what I’m going to do with my life.”

“Any ideas?”

“None so far.” He stopped cleaning his tail. “Moving from the game world to the real one takes some adjustment, you know.” Learning that he’d been raised to sentience in order to play the central figure in a computer game had been something of a shock, especially when he found himself pulled from the make-believe online world and thrust head-first into a plot to assassinate the King of England. “And it doesn’t help that I’m the only one of my kind.”

“There were others like you, at the lab?”

“There was one.” He scowled down at his fingernails, remembering a desperate scuffle on the deck of a flying aircraft carrier, and the obscene feel of his knife cutting into another monkey’s throat. “Look,” he said, “can we talk about something else? It’s Friday night. I should be out drinking and puking.”

Dean ran his finger down the list. “Okay, just a few more questions. You started life as a normal macaque. Then Céleste Technologies filled your head with gelware processors and upgraded you to self-awareness.”

“I thought we were supposed to be changing the subject?”

“I’m getting there, okay? As my readers will know, they had you plugged into an online WWII role-playing game, didn’t they?”

Ack-Ack felt his lips peel back. As the main character in the game, he’d been practically invincible. But he hadn’t known that, and he hadn’t known it was a game. As far as he’d been concerned, every day had been a fight for survival.

Since the events of last year, and the collapse of the
Ack-Ack Macaque
MMORPG, when he went from being one of the world’s most iconic video game characters to its most famous living, breathing monkey, several new games had arisen to fill the niche left by its demise.
Captain Capuchin; Marmoset Madness; Heavy Metal Howler
—according to K8, none of them were as realistic or convincing as his game had been, because their main characters were animated using standard computer simulated AI, instead of the artificially-uplifted brains of actual flesh and blood animals. In fact, the whole uplifting process had been made illegal. There were no other walking, talking animals left in the world; he was the only one, and now always would be.

“I don’t want to talk about this.” He pulled out a cigar, bit the tip off, and lit up. Dean sighed.

“You’re not making this easy,” he said.

Ack-Ack Macaque shrugged. Smoke curled between his teeth.

“Hey, it’s not my fault. This is my evening off, my chance to pull a Bueller. Spend all night drinking rum in the bath, that sort of thing. I didn’t ask to be pestered.”

Dean rolled his eyes. The camera drone hung in the air, a few centimetres from his ear. Its tiny fans made a gentle hissing noise.

“Don’t you want to tell your story?”

Ack-Ack Macaque huffed again. He pinched the cigar between his forefinger and thumb, and puffed a smoke ring at the ceiling.