Slaughtermatic (6 page)

Benny crouched, bending over, then looked up again - the Kid too was laughing, his face a toothful grimace as he ascended and was devoured by the sky. Having been cautioned so often against taking the easy way out, the Kid had left by the window.

‘
Here’s the wire on Mr Dante Hinton Cubit,’ Specter announced, scrolling the file. ‘Nationality - Illinoid. Handicap - white. Religion - fetish orthodox. Weighs in at twenty-five years. Father died in a voting accident. Mother missing, presumed skinned and salted. Cubit skipped to Our Fair State after a personality offence, age of fifteen. Once heard to describe the President as “something to shoot for”. Lotta youth stuff - into Cockroach Centrefold, metabolics, opposed the abolition of privacy. First local offence at eighteen. Used a replica gun to steal a replica sports car and experienced a replica of remorse. Term at the state clench.’

‘
Vanilla crime so far, Harpo,’ spluttered Blince, his face eclipsed by a layer cake. ‘The suspense is killin’ me.’

‘
Got into installation jobs. Fired a high-pressure watercannon at an assembly of throat-singing diabolists, strangled a bulge-eyed trout on the internet, bellowed incendiary nonsense at a cowering nun. Broke into a premises on Chain Street, called the cops and got the occupants arrested for burglary.’

‘
Sure,’ Blince laughed. ‘I remember the guy - tall guy, right? And the old folk nearly went to the chair but somethin’ got in the way.’

‘
They were your parents, Henry.’

‘
Ah, sure, I get it - so what’s the rapsheet on this joker? You tellin’ me he’s some heistmaster out of a sheer blue sky?’

‘
Well, after he moved out of your mom’s place he got heavily into data contraband - facts, Gamete, Wardial, like that. But there ain’t much, Henry. Off-on association with gun geek Findley Taz, alias the Entropy Kid. Other known associates Rosa Control the calibertrix, Hazelwood Restraint the socketeer, Download Jones the digital prankster. Usual bicthoughts - wastebound generation, crime stylist, conception of honour impossible to justify or anatomize. Imagine having a brain like that tucked under your hair.’

‘
Well just pardon me while I knuckle a tear from my eye here,’ said Blince. ‘Pounce if I’m outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout’s runnin’ hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil.’

Specter would have asked Blince to explain the idea in more detail, but knew the idea had no more detail to show. ‘If you say so, Henry.’

‘
Didn’t I? Anyone with a segmented spine could tell you that. Now this guy Danny, bless him, already did time in this distorted metropolis so an installation offence’ll have him dumped on Olympus at the nearest and dearest opportunity. And by God I’ll make the crime fit the punishment if I have to commit it myself.’

‘
That’ll take some spadework,’ said Tredwell Garnishee, who throughout the rapsheet review had sat in a corner, reading by the light of his unimportance.

Blince glared suddenly, but did not speak.

Specter felt embarrassed at having to address an inferior officer. ‘With all due respect, er, Tredwell, Cubit’s either dead or on the premises, and the video scan caught the guy like a snake swallowing a cow.’

‘
I guess this is tantamount to reason, Mr Specter, but you yourself admitted this here is a time breach. I guess Cubit would know the dangers of it and take precautions. But seeing as the possibility of time breaches is officially denied you’ll need to ventilate whoever survives the procedure before he blabs in the perjury room.’

Garnishee returned to the
Parole Violators’ Bugle.

Mind a blur, Specter winged it. ‘No worries, Henry. In fact we could read the charges as we cuff the guy - he’ll top the Dump like a cherry on an angel cake.’ Brandcuffs were now cop-issue - they were lined with nerve-specific electrodes affecting the temporal lobe and, once secured, convinced the prisoner of his guilt irrespective of his actions. Once he was cuffed, the cops had their man.

‘
So long as he gets dead I don’t care about the preliminaries,’ rumbled Blince, lighting a cigar. ‘Now let’s get out there and plug the leak. Oh and Tredwell?’

Garnishee looked up, expectant.

‘
You’re fired.’

7

MR KRAKEN

Mr Kraken, the bank’s head teller, had not been cut in half like his VR equivalent. But he knew that using mainly civilian firearms, he and his staff didn’t stand a chance. The bank floor was black and sticky with blood and the air candied with death.

They had learned to stack their dead inside the entrance to avoid their being ploughed aside by the brotherhood. The five people left were wounded and weak. The bank shrewdly offered a pension but no medical. Within this framework, profuse bleeding and delirium were luxuries few could afford.

Discussing liberty with the brotherhood was like doing math with zeroes, but Kraken had to try.

‘
They asked for food?’ shouted Blince, approaching Benny at the firing line. ‘Pizza? Fries?’ Blince frequently lived like a king by intercepting foodstuffs demanded by raid artists.

‘
No, Chief.’

‘
So what’s holdin’ us back - morality? Gimme your guzzler, trooper boy.’

‘
I don’t got one, Chief.’

‘
Know what Freud’d say about that, Benny? No goddamn gun?’

‘
Whattya want with mine, Chief?’

‘
Specter,’ Blince bellowed, looking for the lawyer. ‘Harpo, you’re packin’ what?’

Specter laid his briefcase on the splinter-glittered ground and flipped the catch, unveiling a tri-part Mag-10 Roadblocker. He handed each part to Blince individually, and by the time Blince was fitting the twenty-two-inch barrel there was knowing laughter all round.

A little figure emerged through the shattered bank entrance and timorously flagged a white sheet of memo paper.

Blince checked the ten-gauge chamber. ‘You know VR was originally used for strategy rehearsal, Benny?’ He raised the gun. Mr Kraken was rubbed out like a scratch-ticket, revealing nothing more valuable than his heart.

Dante didn’t hear the shot, nor the subsequent Duvall gun fire explosion. He hadn’t heard the Kid’s entreaties - rising almost above a whisper - to join him and Corey in their leap off a ledge with an escort of gaseous dictators. The Alice-fall of hypertext had him by the legs and he sat shivering in the recursive re-drench of data. He’d struck the goldstack - it was the tastiest crime candy on offer.

What’s inside a safe tends to relate to what’s outside it. Dante had once believed there was nothing of interest in safes any more as there was no longer much of interest anywhere. He had dwelt in a world of bland dagger work and convenience killings. But under the gloss of violence he had a phobia he couldn’t fight - the absence of ideas assaulted him, a gnawing torture. After a term for rifle abuse he was released into an unrepentant world where denial was the cardinal activity. Murder, theft, riot - they could not permit it to be true. He went around catching ideas about data contraband and information salvage - it was confusing to everyone who knew him. His justifications were banal and lame. He was banished to the back of the riots.

Escaping to Beerlight, Dante discovered the scene. Almost every heist here was an acknowledged beauty. People thought in broad daylight and crime impresarios circused the state. Dante leapt into life’s stream with a coatful of rocks. His psychology was irredeemably modified among absentians, spine addicts, text fetishists and others whose vices were too obscure to be noticed.

Living strategically, he retaliated in advance. Inwardly mobile, he laughed backwards. He earned his paranoia from moment to moment. One of the last activities to be commodified, crime had had more time to innovate and diversify. The glow of that knowledge lit his descent into deep waters.

It was the socketeer Hazelwood Restraint who first told him of the prankster Eddie Gamete. Dante knew about Wardial, Panacea, Betty Criterion and other Beerlighters - some of their crimes were on disk - but Gamete was the main event through being actively databanned. Gamete seemed to have appeared out of and vanished into nowhere like a Sumerian, and people had begun to consider him a sort of dazzling hoax. In the days before the cops joined the army he was a blight on the leisure of both and attracted accusations of blueprinting crime for the populace. But his books contained no descriptions - only aspersions. The thinking man’s Camus, he achieved in his first draft what others attained by years of overwriting. In
Caligari’s Garden
two identical men shave their heads and try to grow a hat, straining to push one out. One dies of a stroke and the other dies of a broken heart. In
Trash Tango
the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo. But the planet is saved when the aliens are found to be allergic to pasta, by now a part of every meal.
A Moment’s Peace
is about a steam-driven apostle which demands coal in return for which it dispenses its prejudices. Deserted on a cracked landscape, it swipes stupidly at the air and breaks alone. Gamete’s novels swarmed with angst angels and others reacting to illness - both physical and mental - by going one better.

Gamete’s detractors pounced on his first non-fiction work, a study of the Eurosmudge which began ‘A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Europe.’ But
The Virus Museum
filled them with glee. It argued that the only interesting thing about serial killers was their tendency to strike again while the snow-haired gran convicted of their previous abomination was in clench - it spoiled the whole process. When challenged by the press about his empirical stand and the veracity of his facts, he remarked, ‘I don’t think my book is far from the truth.’ The remark was reported as ‘I don’t think any book is far from the truth.’

Gamete set up a news service in which all the facts were guaranteed true. Subscribers had to pay through the nose but the other networks damned it nevertheless as unfair competition - cost wasn’t the issue. Three months later Gamete made a rare TV appearance and was shot, his head exploding in a puce blur. A week later it was found that Gamete had financed the news service by hacking the cartographic world standard, hijacking the international dateline and using it as a whip to horse-ride the money market. His exploits had been camouflaged by the chaos following the break-up of states. The continent was briefly reunited in synthetic outrage.

Gamete had always maintained that those who led double lives did so because they could only count that far and this led to speculation among textropists that he’d torn a neat one - they whispered of sightings. Others stammered of a rare work - a pioneer of hypertext and interactives, Gamete had left in testament a book nobody could read and live -
The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel.
Supposedly the work did everything he’d ever been accused of, an irony dipped in blood. It was a digital puzzle box, a thing of dark beauty with the perfect crime at its axis.

A heist doesn’t occur in a bank - it occurs in the heart of the criminal. Dante heard about the Gamete treasure and his heart opened like a spreading gore stain. As data went, this was the true spice.

Following leads from bunker to web to needle bar, he learned more - often from blast-due bomb-zombies who grasped his arm and urged him to stick around. The book read the reader and, once attuned, told a tale which kicked off with the reader’s current circumstances. The book contained a hemisync oscillator which hypnotized the reader. Somewhere in the book was a doorway. The reader was through the door and lost before he knew it. Here was the ultimate role-playing scenario, a maze attuned precisely to the participant’s personality. It was vinyl-bound. It was in a safe box in the Deal Street Bank.

In the bank there really was a safe box registered to ‘Barbanel’. Dante had found his crime, like a long-lost brother.

Rosa Control had made him promise not to fire up the book until they were away and clear. But he was only browsing, keying up sub-entries, going deeper. He had found a scene where Biff Barbanel glances at a book called
Punching the Sarge
- by clicking on the title Dante found he could access the full text of
Sarge
, in which a brilliant mathematician shoots himself with a foam gun and drowns. Shortly before this denouement, a football coach quotes from
The Tangle Hymn
, the text of which Dante accessed with a single click. In
Tangle
there are numerous references to the fictitious author of
The Think Tank
, in which a bigot bums a copy of
Parashite
, which includes a scene in which a drowsy cleric browses through
Knitting the Ties That Bind
, at the front of which
In Your Dreams
is decorously quoted.
In Your Dreams
includes a reference to
Bloody Rest
, in which someone chews up a page from
After the Future
and flobs it at a passing jogger. Seven hundred levels, each level a different book, each written in the ‘torrential’ style so frowned upon for saving time. It was a sub-entry vortex, processing faster than light.

Near the hub the hypersubtext bulged like a landfill. Boundaries blurred into a narrative metastream. A character tried to determine the average half-life of a cliche by firing sepulchral pieties through a particle accelerator, but an insulation fault left him contaminated and talking bullshit. A fighter pilot roared abuse into his intercom to prove the ego is unaffected by variations in airspeed velocity. A convict in transit convinced the cop to whom he was handcuffed that the cop was the guiltier man, at which the cop shot him and escaped. Speeding past fireworks of information and overhearing conversation which described the arting of crime by bringing to it a sense of absolute specificity, Dante plunged into a tale in which he lay injured and jostled in a bodyvan, dead or alive. Fact or fiction? Unreachable, he raced into himself.