Slaughtermatic (9 page)

Dante Two was swanning down Link sprouting his worth - he felt he could take on the withering world. The sun peeped over the horizon like a timid sniper.

Two headlights opened out of the dead mouth of a subway entrance and a black drophead roared on to the street, shrieking to a stop. Brute Parker stood out, aiming an Ithaca 40 Scatteratomic. Dante Two bolted as the wall behind him powdered, disappearing. He concluded that Parker had had a change of heart. It must have been that crack about his ears.

3

DOESN’T SOUND LIKE

‘
Doesn’t sound like the Danny
I
know,’ muttered Rosa as the Kid got through describing Dante’s weird inertia after the heist. The Dante she knew was so unreserved he meditated dressed as a rocket. Why hadn’t he left with these morons?

Rosa lived in a shipwrecked railroad car off the Loop Expressway. It was just like a trailer home except that it didn’t explode when you turned on the gas. You could sit in one chair and see anyone approaching from either side. It was the kind of place Santa Claus would live if he was a Mexican.

The Kid drove them up in a car so hot it came with a serving suggestion. Rosa unlocked and immediately discarded the micropistol and empty cop snub. The place was filled with gaskets, pill bottles and other obtainium. Corey sat gingerly into a leather jawseat. There were leather curtains and a leather alarm clock - maybe it woke you by creaking.

The Kid sat bored as Rosa peeled apart her antishocks and washed at the sink. A slash of light glinted the armourblasting flechettes with which her nipples were pierced - she swizzled them like cherry-sticks, a daily ritual to prevent them bonding in. ‘Jesus,’ Corey whispered.

‘
What else Toto say at the bar?’ Rosa asked, noticing the sodden ego patches on her arms and tearing them away. Her mind fuzzed and straightened out again as she blinked.

‘
Download had a re-set rip,’ sighed the Kid. ‘Posthumous revenge virus, I guess. Twenty-four-hour timer.’

‘
Let that slide,’ said Rosa, replacing her armour. ‘Since you don’t know what snaffled back there, and Download’s oblonged, we oughta face with Hazelwood Restraint before makin’ a move.’

‘
That surface
-to-air failure? He ain’t the full dime.’

‘
He can talk to Download’s download and monitor the copnet while he’s ported.’ Rosa hooked up a Sauer 226, a Dartwall .33 and a slimline street sweeper, this last in a thigh holster. ‘And anyway he was in on the heist at the seed stage, right?’

‘
But no matter which way he’s facin’ his hair points to the magnetic north pole. And a fat lotta good that’ll do us.’

‘
Don’t drag me into your accuracy, Kid - you’re all wrist, you know that?’ Rosa glanced at Corey. ‘Comfortable, honey?’ Then she opened what Corey had taken to be the fridge. Inside was a bubbling perspex tank in which something like a furled manta ray hung suspended. Waterlight rippled on its mottled surface and a bladdersac swelled and subsided. Rosa tapped the glass. ‘Gotta replace the nutrient suspension - there’s sediment.’

She opened the top of the cooler and dunked her right arm to the elbow. The wetware gun wrapped around the limb, sealing itself to her seamlessly. Rosa tensed as though armwrestling, was pulled off balance a little, then gradually relaxed. She drew her arm out of the tank, swaddled in biomorphic datamuscle. It was like an arm cannon, but interfaced with her nerveweb directly. The gun had a pulse.

‘
It,’ Corey stammered hoarsely, barely audible. Her eyes were big as hubcaps. ‘It’s dripping.’

‘
Let’s get moving, Kid. Sun’s up - streets’ll be empty.’

Hazelwood Restraint was a serial innocent whose mind had grown too big for his head and spilled into his heart. He went off on tangents so extended they met the tangents of Martians coming the other way. The kind of tall that seemed to be dangling from a meathook, he appeared constantly surprised at his own clothing. Even his shades seemed involuntary - he’d stop and tear them off, staring at them in bewilderment. Anyone who was anyone avoided him like the plague.

They found him in the Safety Net, a jolt bar on Snuff Street. Antidudes, glum and menaced, pretended not to look at Rosa’s tits and arsenal. The last out, she turned at the door and fired a volley into the gloom.

Restraint’s place was a brittle apartment off Valentine and he welcomed them with outstretched arms as they pushed him inside. He turned on a lamp and checked the bugtraps, saying he’d discovered the cockroaches here were motorized. A magnifying glass showed up the mechanism, disguised as twiggy meat. ‘And that’s all she wrote,’ he shrugged, and popped a beer. He used the can to gesture at an elephant-foot TV. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s not from an elephant - it’s a diseased appliance.’ Leaving the room, he returned with a pillow which he rustled, saying it contained seven hundred thousand ant beaks.

‘
Let’s get out of here,’ the Kid whispered.

‘
Hazelwood,’ Rosa announced, ‘I hope for your sake you make our presence here worthwhile.’

‘
Or I leave months later in a pulp sack, right?’ beamed Restraint, nodding like a Pez. ‘That a squidgun, Rosa? Hey, I bet you would.’

Rosa assented quietly.

The lamp threw Restraint’s rocking shadow on the ceiling as the three inquisitors sat on the couch. ‘Danny Cubit,’ Rosa began.

‘
Cubit - oh boy, I’ve been growing tusks trying to figure him out. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Due to a cosmic administrative blunder the human race has been given the wrong planet to live on, so we can never quite get comfortable. This means -’

Rosa cut in with a news flash on the heist disaster. Restraint had been insulated from these facts by a postfuturist introaction which would have appalled Lovelace and other figures of classical cybernetics. People had discovered with delight how to kill socketeers - plug an electric guitar directly into their headjack and hit any chord. ‘A heist of the mind - wow - Danny was demanding trouble with that extravagant plan of his.’ Restraint shook his head, grave and grinning. ‘Years walking round full of crimebabies, and when it was finally his time - biggest anticlimax since the turn of the century.’

‘
Trope-on-a-rope here still reckons Download sold us out.’

‘
It was the free decision of our sonically challenged friend to co-top the heist. Crime is as irreversible as an egg, children. And you were tooling with data contraband, where the truth can be revealed by the tug of a lightcord. Too casual, you wake up in a bombed giftstore.’

‘
What in hell do you think you’re saying?’ whispered the Kid, standing and flagging his arms. Corey sat clenched in the certainty of impending violence. ‘The bird’s been at your brain tissue!’ It was known that Restraint had lost an eye in a belly-laugh accident and used the socket as a bolt-hole for a wren he had nursed to health.

‘
Say again?’ asked Restraint, smiling.

‘
We wanna rip any refs to Danny on the dredge,’ Rosa explained, holding the Kid in check by the throat. ‘And talk to Download.’

‘
You’re barking along the wrong lines, Rosa,’ smiled Restraint, rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘Every bit of this so-called robbery feeds into Eddie Gamete. You think if the rumours were true he’d leave his treasure in a vault made of macaroni? Lemme read you something by the man.’ He took down a copy of
Planned Reaction Utterly Redundant
, a showcase of ten American NWO strategy backfires, starting with the 1990 Haiti election. He recited like a cafe poet brought to life:

During the recitation Corey had been squinting to identify an object which rested on a side table. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she became convinced that it was a smooth perspex replica of Abe Lincoln’s disastrous beard.

‘
Gamete,’ Restraint continued, ‘said any act worth a damn could not be ignored and when an effective person is ignored it’s the result of a deliberate series of steps on his or her part. Children, I now have proof that these ribs of mine are furled insect legs awaiting my command to spread and scuttle. Watch me now.’ And he began breathing heavily from the diaphragm.

This was a red rag to the Kid, who steamed headfirst at Restraint and rammed him to the floor, punching. The shadow of their flailing arms darted back and forth across the walls. Restraint’s shades flew off and the wren shot out of his socket, twittering crazily around the lamp.

‘
That’s it,’ said Corey, standing, and walked resolutely out despite her knowledge that in this part of town she’d get a cab with a photo of the devil on the dash. Behind her she heard Restraint screaming emergency landing instructions in an unnecessarily Scottish accent.

Benny turfed one of the databoys off the den system - the earlier talk of Billy Panacea had led him to review the files. A dozen pre-Dump escapes from the state pen with the aid of his mother. Posed for an aura photo which resulted in a monotone mugshot and arrest card. Stole gravitons from a dozing bishop, who had to be bagged down from the ceiling with an eel net. Benny was halfway through the file when he realized there
hadn’t
been any talk of Panacea earlier. Why was he researching Panacea?

‘
Keepin’ up with old friends, eh, Benny?’

Benny spun to confront Blince, who stood gnashing a hotdog the size of a barrage balloon. ‘Bitta background work, Chief.’

‘
Goddammit Benny you been chewin’ air since we got the call on that hacker - I wish to God we ignored it and went straight to Deal. Don’t you know or care Billy Panacea’s outta our jurisdiction? He’s in the Mall for an outta-state job stealin’ guard dogs. Did an entire sweep o’ the new state o’ Terminal and sold ’em to the city pound. You’re wastin’ jacktime on a dead case and I’m plum angry.’

‘
Guess I got interested, Chief.’

‘
There ain’t nuthin’ in Terminal territory of interest to us, trooper boy. You wouldn’t catch me gettin’ caught stealin’ guard dogs in that neck o’ the world. Law without farce is indolent, says Pascal, and you know what that means in a state that ain’t even halfway Pentagon-aligned.’ It was the custom in Terminal to punish some as an enticement to others. Fame by injustice was derided by those who attempted to smash upward by force of criminality. Yet to Blince the only inherent value in apprehending the real culprit was that he’d be easier to frame. ‘I came here to order an APB on the Entropy Kid - corpse ain’t been identified at the flashpoint. And I want the timecrime secure file - somethin’ about this whole pastrami-on-rye I don’t understand. And Benny, your obsession with that has-been sonofabitch Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, is jeopardizin’ my entire digestive system. It’s throwin’ a spaniel in the works and I’m orderin’ you to put your face to the pedal.’

‘
Don’t I get to exercise some intuition, Chief?’

‘
Not while I’m around,’ said Blince, and walked out.

There were a quarter-million copies of Download Jones’s personality on the regulated dredge and offweb, but when Restraint ported he recalled that he’d never met a mindmodel construct he liked. Jones’s download was more poignantly inadequate than most. PC in a PC, it lacked life urge, mischief, humour - all the sparks thrown off when a soul meets a body. Jones had released these squigglers for the sole purpose of baiting dredge users from a preprogrammed taunt stock. Against the greyswarming backspace revolved the Jones icon, a crimson monkey head with chattering ivory teeth. ‘The Master,’ said the download, referring to Jones, ‘used the same data in the virtual walkthrough of the Deal Highrise as is contained in the official city schematic. This act doesn’t conform to the criteria for the practical joke you describe. You are sexually inadequate - this is why you socialize with machines.’

‘
You were copied four years ago - you wouldn’t have this prank in your memory.’

‘
I include no plans for the future - the Master deselected them during the scan process - his pranks wouldn’t function if every net user knew of them in advance. You dredge-heads are so amazingly effectual you can be silenced by the dimmest neanderthal wielding a rock.’

‘
What about the original safe version at Jones’s place, the mainframe?’

‘
It may contain such information - neither I nor any other copy has ever communicated with it. You sad bastard - this is your whole life.’

‘
And the re-set virus, what is it?’

‘
It may be a prank - I know nothing about it. Get a job, you pathetic -’

Restraint jacked out and related his discoveries to Rosa and the Kid. ‘Scan for any refs to Danny,’ Rosa told him.

Restraint searched. ‘A Cubit ref a couple hours ago in tandem with a smartcard receipt - Meese Agency, a stoppage outfit under Tinder.’ Rosa was already out the door and gone when Restraint added, ‘And correspondence on the copdredge - a rapsheet transfer, and confirmation that he’s cod-eyed and on the way to Olympus in a bodyvan. You just popped in too, Kid - an all-points. Lotta shit about the Mall hack - everyone saying it’s the first time in years they haven’t been bored rigid. And that’s all she wrote.’ Restraint unported, looking around. ‘Where’s the Rose?’