Slaughtermatic (4 page)

But finding himself with two cops in a VR deck, he knew the dry seed of wisdom was dead. He jacked Blince and his yes man into the Mall, hoping they’d meet some old friends.

Once in the layout, they made for the bank and Download started to sweat. Though based on Beerlight, the Mall was entirely lacking in detail, which he had to patch in on the run. When they reached the bank, he superimposed the sim he’d created for the heist rehearsal, including demographic glyphs for bank personnel. Beyond this he was newted for ideas and, figuring the cops were here about the heist anyhow, lassoed the fly-by-wire in Rosa’s jetfoil, bringing her in. ‘So it’s hacker shit,’ she said now, having heard the sob story. ‘Freedom in cyberspace’d be fine and dandy if we happened to live there.’

‘
Don’t speak ill of the drip-fed,’ said Download, trying to be forceful through a snot-cemented nose. ‘Some of the all-time headmen are inside. Babyface Terrier. Billy Panacea.’

‘
We’re on itchy ground here, Chief,’ said the little cop in the sphere.

‘
Billy who?’ asked Rosa, looking for a real steamer. She was sick of fair guns and metabolics - Download’s Glock was irreversibly modified for mood amendment. Glancing in a cupboard, she found a microwave pistol jerrybuilt from a cell phone.

‘
Burglar extraordinaire. Burgled up a storm a decade ago.’

Rosa found a wedge of six-hour ego patches and applied two, stuffing the rest in her jacket. ‘Listen Jones, I misjudged you - you’re not dishonest, just stupid. I brought the wrong kinda gun.’

‘
Count your blessed chickens, Rosa - I nearly flipped my fang when the prefabs burst in.’ As well as the handbuzzers surgically implanted under his palmskin, Jones had a toggle under the first right premolar of his upper jaw linked to a scatterat bomb in his chest. ‘I could have come to a forensically sticky end.’

‘
But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ yelled the big cop.

‘
How ’bout them?’ asked Rosa. ‘They come here clean?’ She patted down the nightmaring cops and pulled a Beretta 9mm off the small guy. She slotted the snub into the Approach holster. ‘These clenchers musta heard about the heist on the way in here - they wouldn’ta got to the scene in time anyway, and meanwhile thanks to you Danny’s waitin’ for the pick-up. It’ll be no bed o’ cherries on that roof.’

‘
Somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time,’ called the big cop, and the crimewires sniggered despite each other. Download’s face, which usually looked as if it had been thrown together in the dark, was fleetingly natural.

A clank of the monroe grill warned of the brotherhood’s approach, and Rosa drew the snub in time to break four cops like paintbombs against a wall. There was a rear exit and Rosa took it as shots burst off and Download shielded his machinery. Pursued through an underground garage and on to the street, Rosa pelted across traffic into blur-stains of exhaust and neon. Male cops were taught it was okay to shoot a woman in the back, but most still considered this too much of a commitment.

Blince scuttled down a blank reproduction of Scanner Street. Luminescent steam rose from the gratings like a wraith, flickered out, then repeated in an identical pattern. Sodium lights bleached the skullfront of what should have been Britomart and the Vein Arcade. The pagoda roof of Otomo’s Needle Bar was like a crude white plastercast. Blince slowed with a cancering apprehension. He felt as welcome here as a dog at a dance marathon. Did dogs really need eyebrows? He thought. Didn’t those mothers know when to quit?

A low thrumming filled the non-air above his head. The street held on to the walls as if a bomb was going to drop. A giant bug was whirring out of the digital sky. Blince made a face and began to run for the mouth of an alley, covered by a flitting halftone shadow. Crashing through clean trash, he looked back - a towering chrome grasshopper with hydraulic rodlegs came to rest outside the alley opening and lowered a head like a jack-o’-lantern, peering in at him with a solar eye of poured steel. A headcap flipped and sprung a rotary cannon full of ammo and surprises.

Blince saw diversity as a disease and never embraced it. He took one swatch at the mischief engine’s jeweled thorax and raised his Colt. ‘I’m Chief Henry Blince. My soul magnifies the law. I’m arrestin’ you for incitin’ somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time.’

The Demograph blooped like a mudbubble - didn’t have a setting for insects.

An alternator winked in the armour face.

The bug was an inmate who’d changed her identity code, a hack to get her through the day. And she couldn’t believe her luck. Ten years ago she’d been falsely convicted on Blince’s word. Imprisoned by a maze of irrefutable conjecture, she’d come to believe that the trials of this and the actual world were rooted in the delay of Blince’s death. If this delay were foreshortened or eliminated, the way forward would be crystal clear.

Blince watched the texture-mapped machine’s lung inflate and shrivel like a surgical bladder, its gunsighter ranging like the pupil of an eye, the head lock in. His mind too stunned to connect, he saw the cannonfire leap and was instantly looking at Download’s cop-filled basement, the afterimage of doom blooming on his retina. A geek in jestware was being worked over with a cable hook. The cavalry had arrived.

Eyephones hung off Blince’s face like novelty eyes on springs. The enhancer drug cleared like a nightmare as he reached repeatedly for a gun which didn’t exist. Here in actuality there was no such thing as a demographic firearm - the nearest equivalent was the Nafta gun, which killed Mexicans first. As Benny would learn and Blince would never let himself discover, the panicking Jones had armed the cops with copies of the first gun he’d blundered upon in the Mall layout - a virus created by an inmate.

The responsible party was Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, and back in the Mall he stood atop a virtual building spectating the sad frustration of the bug. It was clawing into the alley mouth like a cat at a rat hole.

When the Blince and Benny borgs popped into the Mall it was the first time in four years Panacea had glimpsed the true enemy. He sat down, turned to the ersatz sky and knew that, in a honeycomb bunker somewhere, his real eyes wept at the hours and years wasted circumventing the interference of the law.

5

IT OCCURRED

It occurred to Dante that midnight in the Mall might not coincide with midnight in the outer world. Waiting had proved nothing. Disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality, he felt more and more complacent about their position. He gazed out of the window, his thoughts dispersing harmlessly. Am I under the influence? he wondered. He’d once seen a wave weapon in action. During a little riot in McKenna Square, a cop flung a crucifixion bomb, which skittered into the plaza. A hemisonic flux affecting the guilt centres of the brain converted the entire crowd to Catholicism. Unable to look each other in the eye, the inhibited mob were fish in a barrel for the brotherhood, who slaughtered them before they could lapse.

The cops on Deal Street seemed inert and bored. A few fired at the entrance and bank front, and someone returned a little. Couple of carshells burned. A mail truck, leadlined against electro-radiation, lay on its roof and smouldered like charcoal. There was a snack stand and situation van.

Dante turned back to watch Corey the Teller reason with the Kid. Trying to buck his ideas up, she was inadvertently undermining the cowardice, laziness and force of habit that had kept his wrists closed for years.

An escaped braincut subject, the Kid was neurally bonded to his gun. When he pressurized the trigger he got an instant flash of his victim’s eye-view and the barrel of his own firearm. Several convicts had been given the Kafkacell implant experimentally, but rather than inhibit firing it sent them on a kill frenzy, their only motive a repeatedly frustrated urge to self-destruction. The Kid also found it improved his aim.

The heist was mining a rich seam of gloom in the Kid. Lacking the perversity so pivotal to the present headcrime, he was racing to waste. Looking as sad and creepy as a pickled alien, he whispered he’d give a medal to the man who could loosen the iron grip of his life. Corey, who had boosted eighty thousand smackers from the register in the confusion of the heist, considered him her ticket. She would have berated him anyway in her professional capacity as a stranger. ‘You’d be surprised how sullen
I
can be,’ she told him. ‘But you look like a bile fish, for Christ’s sake. It’s wrong.’

‘
Why, miss - what happens.’

‘
Morally
wrong. Whatever shitstorm of motives brought you here they better be good enough to get y’out.’

‘
Circular thought’s a way of surrounding something,’ he said in a voice devoid of all emphasis.

‘
What? What are you, nuts? A maniac? Don’t you know there’s a streetful of army cops outside this doll brothel? Speak up you sonofabitch.’

She barked at Dante. ‘Hey, Lofty.’ But Dante was reading a book and did not reply. What sort of a hold-up was this?

The Kid swallowed a Coma Plus and almost inaudibly stated the view that humanity’s demise was rooted in an evolutionary strand which caused its ass-cheeks to undergo binary fission like amoebas under a microscope. ‘Every hundred thousand years, miss. First one buttock, now two, in a few years four, then eight, sixteen and so on. And you know where that’ll lead. Cumbersome, dragging heaps of dough.’

Corey breathed deep a while. A commotion of slaying echoed from outside. That Danny guy looked as hypnotized as a Segabrat. They were surrounded by inflatable bastards. She wasn’t any virtual puppet, but this wasn’t any virtual heist, so the peril level was even stevens. She’d have to take charge. ‘Kid. You and me get outta here, we’re happy as pups in a sidecar. Tell ya a secret.’ And she drew up a pantleg on an ankle-holstered Hitachi 20-gauge, one of the countless untraceable one-off guns designed on desktop since the Crime Bill. ‘Life’s a geology of precaution. Your pal’s knee-deep in himself. You hold up a place without thinking? What if everyone acted that way?’

The Kid found he agreed with the argument - it was what had stopped him becoming a doctor. What if everyone became a doctor? Who’d drive the buses? By some imperceptible transition he found himself feeling interested. He harboured a sly respect for her leg, the gun and the pink painkiller of her mouth.

Seeing a brawl in a bar, Download Jones had called the cops and been arrested for obstructing justice. A little blister of a crime, it had swelled into pranksterism. Pretty soon he was selling other people to science and slapping fire-eaters on the back so they’d gulp and explode. Now he sat in a yelling-cell at the end of a distinguished career and a cop was saying, ‘You pulled off a strong one, Jones - Chief still believes there’s a gun you can set for niggers.’

Snowblind with crass mediocrity, the cops were nettled and grateful at having to work over a small guy who was by their standards weird and clever. Download smiled in deference to their coarse elation. They tore off his coat and released a blizzard of ID cards. Download waded through them, yelling that one somewhere was authentic. An emphatic man who wore his ignorance like a badge of honour engaged him in a no-nonsense interrogation with a butane torch. Download underwent the surgical assault with a stupefying resilience, relentlessly inhaling and exhaling despite everyone’s best efforts. Crestfallen at Download’s unyielding integrity, the surgeon asked him about the Mall and snipped at him with a bolt-cutter. Download volunteered nothing but fluids. Blood flooded out in great gushing spurts - nature’s way of telling him he was bleeding. The overhead fans churned. Download felt like an individual nerve.

‘
All the world loves a scamp,’ said the surgeon, ‘but in this case we’ll make an exception.’ He dealt Download’s skull a blow which turned it into a personalized planetarium.

Dazzlingly incoherent, Download began blurting a confetti of ominous statements. There was a device in his jaw - though his personality was on the net he’d prefer to preserve the meat version, scars and all. The surgeon looked crosseyed at his colleagues and made a drilling motion to his temple. Misunderstanding, one went out and returned with a power drill and a purposeful expression.

Now Download was yammering about another device, one he had to re-set every day - if he wasn’t free to do so it would unleash itself. He rarely made a noise on the subject, as there were people who would kill him if they thought it would cause trouble. ‘Ten past one, man. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it till I’m a seething heap of bugs.’

‘
That may not be long,’ the surgeon told him, meaning he had a space reserved on Olympus Dump.

For years it had been assumed that expensive overcrowding would lead the city to establish the cod-eye sentence for all offences or abolish visitation and allow inmates to die and rot in an unofficial capacity. But it occurred in a more roundabout fashion due to some low-spark suggesting that lifers could be stored cheaply and easily in bulk cryogenic freezers. When the policy was adopted, the entire population went berserk in the hope of being slammed in a fridge and thawed out to a better world. The system was turned off and the powerdown blamed on faulty equipment - technology hadn’t advanced enough to keep the inessential alive. The authorities saw that the exercise had been unnecessarily elaborate and that rather than stacking thugs in a freezer they might as well stack them in a landfill. The Dump towered over Beerlight, a lesson to potential lawbreakers that the law was already broken.