Toxicity (42 page)

You are going to die.

Yes.

You are dying.

I know.

Fight it!

Fuck you.

Fight it, damn you! You’re an
Anarchy Android! Show some... RAGE!

No.

It was a simple word. The
simplest of them all.
No.
But it carried such weight and such awesome
power. Horace was satisfied to impose his will over that inner voice which had
haunted him for so long. His tormentor, his brother, his controller, his
subversive, mocking inner demon. His KillChip. His fucking KillChip.

Yes. He knew about his KillChip.
A Quantell Systems Sanity Module designed to keep him sane, ha-ha, how the fuck
was that supposed to work? By giving him voices in his head?

With the first two generations of
android, there had been a predisposition to go off the rails: crazy, postal,
call it what you will. But Anarchy Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Earth’s
Oblivion Government, had felt the need to fit a controlling module straight to
the brain. Androids were never told about the implementation, and each one was
massively different, a discrete AI personality but with a sole functionality -
to keep the android sane, and by keeping the android sane, to make him a more
efficient killer.

It worked. Some of the time. Most
of the time.

By fitting a device that almost
made the android feel like he was hearing voices in his head, a dark brother
(or sister) who would mock and cajole and question his actions; well, instead
of making an android crazier than a jilted paramedic who finds his wife being
fucked in the woods by his best mate, it somehow made him more sane.

Dying,
he thought.

I am dying.

But then... so be it, because I
am an android and I’m an Anarchy Model; a torture and murder unit, a device that
hunts down humans (and other androids, hush) and slowly takes them apart until
I discover whatever insipid information I have been charged with finding. And
then I kill. And I don’t always make it sweet. This is no dying in your sleep.
This is no sudden heart attack or being hit by a truck. No, I make it fucking
personal, and I make it fucking personal on purpose because -well, death is a
serious business. It should hurt. Should be remembered. Like the old Viking
warriors dying in battle; if you didn’t die with your sword in your hand, if it
didn’t hurt in life, then you’re weren’t getting into the fucking afterlife,
that was for sure.

So death had to be special.

And the more it hurt, the more
special it was. Right?

And so, yes, now I die. I am
ready to meet my maker. Ha-ha. But I already met him, a sterile scientist in a
lab of white Formica and cheap stainless steel. Glass test tubes. White lab
coats. Oh, daddy, why did you forsake me?

So... you mean there’s no Heaven?
No android Heaven?

Do you not believe?

I believe, all right. I believe
in the sanctity of the organism, I believe in replication and separation and
multiplication. I believe every organism is an island and we’re born alone,
created alone, and fucking die alone...

But what of love? And honour?
Friendship? Truth?

No such thing, my little KillChip
compadre. Just social webs put in place to make us try to care; when, in
reality, empathy is a learned thing. Look how cruel a human child is? Pulling
the legs off spiders. Standing on slugs. Swatting wasps. Battering little
brothers and sisters. Smacking other children in the playground over petty
shit. There’s no empathy there, no in-built natural need to look after fellow
humans. Children are a distillation of the human condition - before social
conventions are forced into place, like a behaviour brace instilling fear. You
will behave like this, or God will punish you. You will behave like this, or
you’ll spend your life locked in prison. Or worse, hang from a loop of rope
until your neck is broken. Humans don’t protect other humans because they care
about them -they protect them out of fear. Social etiquette is simply a
framework for self-preservation.

Horace sank. His mind was a
fluttering of black and blood red.

No
oxygen,
he thought.

He laughed at that.

Greenstar had fucked him up good.
Killed him.

But that didn’t matter. Nothing
mattered. His death had simply been a matter of time, and Horace, The Dentist -
well, he knew that his passing would make the world a better place.

What good deeds did you do?

I never executed a very young
child.

That’s good!

I simply crippled them.

That’s not good.

Who are you to judge? That’s the
way I was programmed. The way I was made. I was a distillation of the human fucking
condition. I never learned to fear the system. I wasn’t force-fed alien
religions in the hope of making me a better person. No. I was android. I was
pure. A pure killing machine.

And that’s the way you’ll die...

Yeah. An eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth... just like the Bible II Remix jokes about.

It’s sad.

Why? Live by the sword, die by
the sword. And I’ve lived so very strongly, Killer.

The water pressure of the
Biohazard Ocean was growing now, not that Horace could feel or endure any more pain.
He had reached his limit, as much pain as is physically possible to feel, and
in reaction his body was shutting down; his brain was cutting off his pain
synapses, severing nerves, halting vital functions. Preserving itself. Until
it, too died. And then it would be game over.

And yet...

Something was happening.

The murk, the undersea gloom, was
growing brighter.

Horace saw rocks, huge mountain
ranges under the ocean. And they glowed, glowed with toxic waste and toxic
sludge, a radioactive, bacteriological nightmare of polluted seaweed and heavy
metal detritus. Horace came to rest on a mountaintop, gently bumping along
until he wedged between two rocks. He struggled for a moment against the steel
winch cable that bound him, but then the last of the fire left his system and
he lay there waiting for his brain to die, and for all thoughts to cease...

All around lay glowing weeds,
shifting gently left and right in ocean currents. Tiny fish darted in front of
Horace’s eyes, deformed, many with beaks and legs and massive flippers, and
then disappeared, flitting between the rocks on the ocean-floor mountain-top.

I’ve been on the mountain,
thought Horace, and nearly died
laughing.

He sat there for what seemed an
age. It was certainly long enough to drown. Long enough to drown fifty times
over.

I am not dead.

And then the voice came to him,
and it was not the bitter, sardonic, mocking laughter of his inbuilt KillChip;
this was something vastly different. The voice was soft, almost female, and it
didn’t come to his mind via his ears, but felt more to be absorbed from
everything around him. Confusion was suddenly his master. Everything he had
known and trusted and believed in turned out to be a lie. He should be dead. He
should be fucking fish food...

Welcome.

Horace considered this.

I should be dead,
he said, although he did not
speak with his mouth.

Yes.

But I am not.

No.

Why?

Who knows?

Who are you?

I am...
and a flicker of images that
transcended verbal language. It showed the rocks of the ocean, the waters
filled with pollution, the deformed fishes in the sea, the distorted seaweed on
the rocks. It was all of these and yet more.

Horace felt suddenly very small,
and very hollow.

Like an android speaking to God.

As he considered what next to
say, he watched some glowing seaweed fronds detach, and float towards him. They
hovered in front of his mouth, as if waiting to gain entry through an iron
gate. Horace blinked, still incredibly weak and squatting on the razorblade of
death.

May I?

What?

I wish to search your...
again, images. But there was no
doubt what the voice meant. It did not mean his mind or his feelings or his
memories. It meant his
soul.
His
android soul.

You may,
he said, filled with sudden
bitterness and regret.
But you will not like what you find.

Horace opened his mouth and the
seaweed drifted inside. He felt it slither down his throat, along with more
gallons of toxic pollutant. Horace waited, suddenly tense, wondering if, when
the floating voice discovered what a bad person - he corrected himself, a bad
android
- he had been, it would rip him apart from the inside out.

He waited. Waited to die.

Again.

He laughed at that, and bubbles
escaped from his mouth in the underwater gloom.

Eventually, there came a sound.
Like a sigh.

I
see,
said the voice.

So you hate me?

And he got a sudden image of an
all consuming rage, like molten mountains rearing from the oceans across an
entire planet and laying waste to a billion people who had destroyed the
world...

Not unless you can match what
Greenstar has done to me.

You’re the planet, aren’t you?
Amaranth?

No.

You’re the ocean? The waters of
the world?

No.

Then what, by the Mother of
Manna, are you?

I am the Toxicity,
said the voice.

Horace considered this, and he
considered it for a long time.

I
do not understand.

For decades, toxic waste has been
pumped into the oceans, under the mountains, into the air, into the very seams
of the planet. Across the entirety of the world known as Amaranth, every manner
of biological hazard, poisonous heavy metal, toxic pollutant, radioactive
material and general purpose waste has been pumped and dumped and tipped and
buried and strewn without regard for what was done; what, really, was being created.

You’re the waste?
said Horace, in awe.

I
am the toxic scourge on this
bedrock,
said the voice.

How can you be alive? That’s...
impossible...

What is life but a chemical
accident? Your race, your
human
race, began as a random chemical soup powered by proteins and nutrients and
sunlight. Cells grew and mutated and developed and split and mutated. Well, I
have proteins and nutrients and sunlight. I have radiation and metals and
carbons and every single element that could form a human - and more. I have
living cells. And I have spread. And I have mutated. And I live.