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THE ROOKERY

I pull on my leather trousers (1770s, Imperial Prussian 10th Hussars), my black Cossack shirt (1890s, Greater Futurist Republican Alliance Army), my snakeskin jackboots (1920s, Confederate Texas Rangers) and my tunic (1850s, Queen's Own Chinese Infantry, 2nd Tibetan Regiment). I strap my Japanese katana at my left side and my holstered Curzon-Youngblood chi-gun at my right, and clip two jackblades into their sheaths, one on each boot. I pull on my bomber's jacket (1940s, Royal East Indian Air Corps, made of sacred-cow hide, lined with the highest-quality yeti fur) and drag on over this my greatcoat (1900s, Free Ruritanian Partisans). The rucksack I fling over one shoulder is heavy with the weight of high explosives—sticks of dynamite and black bulbous bombs. Finally I pick up my black kidskin gloves, and sling a white silk scarf around my neck. Elegance is the assassin's deadliest weapon.

Outside, the Second City of the Empire is in the middle of another bitter autumn night, the roads and pavements buried in a flowing sludge of mulch and sleet, the grimy sandstone buildings of the Rookery, all those tenements and abandoned churches, lit in the volcanic glow of halogen streetlamps. I step out onto the vast skeleton of scaffolding that runs through the Rookery like the web of some giant insane spider, grab a steel pole and swing up, grab, swing up, jump and swing, until I'm above it all, standing on the roof of what was once part of a university. It's cold out in this crazy world, but I'm wrapped up warm, I'm armed and armored, and the sky is painted a magnificent crimson. I feel keen.

Here, on the roof of the great gothic tower of the University Library, on the crest of the hill on which the Rookery is built (and
in
which the Rookery is built—in abandoned subway tunnels and mineshafts where the most hunted and desperate find their sanctuary), the only thing more breathtaking than the view is the cold wind that howls in from the east. Beneath me, what was once a simple grid of tenements is all but buried in a century's growth of scaffolding and boardwalks, corrugated iron extensions and appendages, whole streets roofed over and built upon. Hell itself would be an easier place to map. I look out toward the borders of this maze of thieves and traitors.

The wide swath of greenery that is Kelvinbridge Park swings round the Rookery, hemming it on three sides—north, east and south—resplendent with its riverside of ruined mills and fallen viaducts, the glass palaces of the Botanical Gardens to the north, the stately grandeur of the Kelvinbridge Museum to the south, all floodlit for the delight of promenading visitors. Over to the west, the bustling, hustling Byres Road marks out the area's last boundary, where the clubs and coffeehouses of the West End literati meet the pawnshops and pornographers of the Rookery.

Once this walled-in area underneath me held the studios of Bohemia, the spires of Academia, back before Mosely's abolition of state-funded education. Now made up mainly of the dens and haunts of my fine fellow wasters, the Rookery has become a haven for every radical and revolutionary who grudges the steel grip the Guilds are gradually tightening around the throats of every man and woman in the Empire, for every rebel out to fight the system, for every would-be anarchist assassin suffering under the grandiose delusion that the actions of one man might change the course of History. That would be me.

Over the scattering of fiery lights that mark the city's roads and buildings, airtrains flash across the sky, riding the Wire, venting jets of blue-green orgone vapors, steaming out across the night. It always seems ironic to me that in such a prudish, prurient country the great source of power is the force first harnessed by the tantric masters of Tibet, the energy they knew as
kundalini,
which we stole and renamed “orgone energy,” that cosmic, mystic, sexual force.

I slip my silver Half-Hunter from my pocket, flick it open to check the time, click it closed and slip the fob watch back into my pocket. It's getting close to showtime. Out in the night, the
Iron Lady
is cruising, vast and regal, a giant of the skies, toward the city of its creation, this Second City of the Empire, carrying within the First Director of the Parliamentary Board of Elizabeth Regina, Queen of the British Isles and Colonies, Empress of India and the Orient, Sovereign Heart of Pax Britannica. Old Powell's getting on a bit now, but he's as much a threat as ever, if not more so.

It's not the man himself I'm worried about, just the mindworm that he's carrying in his head, the sordid little dream, the meme, that pulls his strings and pushes his buttons, looking to lay its sick spores in the empty thoughts of all the hate-filled whores and motherfuckers too dumb to see what's happening. Language lives, my friend, information with intent, aware, awake inside us. Call them gods, call them demons, they're the archons of our world, these fucking mindworms, spawned in speeches, nurtured in newspapers, feeding on our fears and desires. Ideas are not just born, my friend. They breed. And behind every good demagogue is a bad idea. I should know; I'm a myth myself.

I check my watch again. It's time.

Time for the giant of the skies to meet its Jack.

Caledonia Dreaming

“You see the world as a very hostile, threatening place, don't you? You feel you don't belong? So you live in a fantasy world where you're the hero. It's like a…second skin for you, isn't it, this ‘Jack Flash,' a shell.”

“You'd think that, wouldn't you? I mean, what's the alternative? That this world is actually run by Mammon and Moloch,
literally
run by gods of greed and brutality who've got you all so juiced that you don't even see them changing it around you.”

“Mammon and Moloch, Jack? Those are—”

“Myths? Metaphors? What does the word
Guernica
mean to you, Doctor?”

Starn shrugs, shakes his head.

“What should it mean to me?”

Jack turns his head away in disgust.

“John Maclean,” he says. “The Armenian Massacre. Lorca. Does any of that mean anything to you? My Lai?”

“Jack, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is called apophenia. It's when everything in the world seems loaded with significance, part of some great truth. You see patterns that aren't there. It's where the paranoia comes from; because someone, something has to be behind it all. God or the Devil. The government. Your ‘Empire,' perhaps?”

“Mammon or Moloch,” says Jack.

“Exactly.”

“You didn't answer my question. What does ‘Guernica' mean to you?”

“It doesn't mean anything. What is it? A person? A place?”

“And you think I'm fucking crazy?”

“You need help, Jack. You need to admit that you're sick, so we can help you. Can't you see that you've invented this ‘Empire' to justify your own fear, your own insecurity, your shame, your self-pity?”

“I could ask you the same question. All of you. You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me.”

Starn runs a finger over the laptop's trackpad, moving the mouse across the screen, but with no real purpose other than to give his hand something to do while he thinks. The schizophrenic worldview is never completely senseless, he knows; he made his name with a paper on paranoid delusions as symbolic representations of a hostile world. But this schizoid is just too conscious of the boundary between fantasy and reality. He's not faking it but, at the same time, he's not totally engulfed in the psychosis, Starn is sure.

“You talk about Mammon and Moloch, Jack, but I think you know you're talking about something else. You talk about the Empire but I think you know this ‘Empire' isn't real in any actual sense.”

“How real are your dreams, Doctor?”

“Dreams aren't real at all, Jack.”

“I am.”

THE ABYSS

OPERATION:
Verify schizophrenia hypothesis; scan for inception.

NARRATIVE DETECTED:

“Jack, you're fucking cracked, man. You're fucking crazy.”

He pants, recovering his breath, rubbing at the red marks where the fingers gripped his throat, and grinning. He's proved his point.

“Told you you couldn't kill me. Told you you'd chicken out before I did.”

“Yeah, but that doesn't mean shit.”

Jack can't quite put his finger on it but somewhere deep inside he's sure that, somehow, it does. Maybe he is crazy. He has these ideas sometimes, that he's an alien or an android, Lucifer or Jesus—and this shithole town does feel like his own private hell some days, like he's fucking nailed to a cross. But he's smart enough to know that those are delusions, no more real than the Jack Flash character he finds himself drawing on the pages of his schoolbooks or dreams about at night, with his hair the color of fire.

But he's smart enough to know that the delusions have a point, that something in his head is trying to make a fucking point.

You can't die.

He tries to understand what it is his crazy, fucked-up inner self is trying to tell him, but he can't get his head around it.

It's bullshit, he thinks. Everyone dies. He could take his fucking school tie, make a noose of it and hang himself from a light fixture if he wanted to…or if he had the guts, at least. And he wants to know. He wants to know what's on the other side of dying. He wants to know if all the bullshit about eternity is true. But it can't be, can it? There is no heaven, no hell, no God, no Devil, no angels.

He rubs at his neck. He's proved his point, shown Joey that he wasn't shitting him, that he doesn't give a fuck anymore, that he could walk right up to Death and spit in his face and fucking
dare
him to swing his scythe. Except that there is no Death, not like that.

And suddenly—it's just oxygen starvation—he feels light-headed—it's the flood of oxygen back into his brain—and the world is kind of fuzzed and jittery and—

Guy is leaning over him.

“Jack. Wake up, Jack. Bloody hell. Are you OK?”

He's lying on the ground, sprawled out, looking up at the sky, the clear blue sky so wide and empty with only the golden crescent of the sun to cast a gloaming light across it, and there's earth under his back, earth rich and dark with clay and green with thick moist grass, red, gold and orange leaves blowing across his hands.

And then Guy leans real close, he does, and he looks so much older than he should, like there's another him, an older him under the surface, and he whispers very quietly.

“Time to wake up, Jack Flash.”

He snaps awake straight out of the half-state he's been in, part memory, part dream, drifting off to sleep, and looks around the bedroom, but there's nothing there. A palpable, visible
nothing
there in the darkness. Nothing has just whispered his name to him in the dead of night.

It moves around the room, a cold, dead presence—no, an absence, an abyss that's gazing into him.

He gets out of bed and walks around the room, more entranced than afraid. He doesn't switch the light on in case this sense—this physical sense—of nothing is dispelled by it. It's like a ghost standing over a grave with his name on it, a dream that's walked out of his head and into the world—no, a dream that's walked out of the world and into his head. Maybe it's just his imagination, but that's not what it feels like. It feels like someone else's imagination.

And then the nothing becomes something. It becomes him.

And Jack Flash feels the flesh of his new body, and he knows that it's all good.

“Keen,” he says.

The Empire Never Ended

A knock. The door opens and Starn glares at the inspector, annoyed at the interruption. The woman just stands there, holding a large brown file in her hand, silently waiting. Starn nods.

“Sorry, excuse me a second.”

He steps out of the room, closes the door quietly behind him.

“You've found something.”

“Well, yes and no. Something turned up when we ran his mug shots through the machine. Not sure if it will be any use, though.”

She hands Starn the folder.

“You found a match? A name would be very helpful, Inspector. Anything that can give me a handle on where he comes from.”

“Well, that's the rub,” she says. “This doesn't exactly tell us much at all about where he comes from.”

Starn opens the folder. All that's inside is a printout of an old black-and-white photograph. He recognizes the face immediately, even in the softened, blurry gray tones fading to white around the edges of the ellipse, even wearing the peaked cap and with the solemn air of someone as much
in control
as his twin in the interview room is out of it. Hair trimmed tight around the ears. Lips pursed in a smile that seems just ever-so-slightly ironic, detached. A certain intensity to the eyes.