Читать книгу Slaughtermatic - Steve Aylett - Страница 10

In his tender years, Eddie Gamete wrote a mindmauler on ‘The Difficulty of Locomotion on the Upper Lattice Face of a Proton Pulse Bridge’. The difficulty alluded to was the fact that Proton Pulse Bridges were a figment of Gamete’s imagination and anyone attempting to locomote on one would surely die. ‘And I’ll certainly laugh,’ he concluded.

As he strode across the non-existent landscape, Blince’s reasoning was impregnable. No civilian would have been fooled. The brotherhood, however, was trained to disregard detail. If anything, Blince felt more secure than ever in the mutable blur of the unreal.

Benny, however, was undergoing squirly symptoms from three hours’ circumstance abuse. There were two ideas tilting at each other across the blank, blizzarding wastes of his psyche. The first was that the gunshot limp he’d endured for eight years had disappeared as though he was placing no real pressure on the leg. The second was that Blince was a bullnecked idiot for deeming to leave a geek basement a few hours back without arresting the geek. The VR enhancer drugs Download had hit them with as soon as they entered the basement were neither here nor there. Ironically, Benny’s mind was more lucid now than it had ever been, but the clarity was as fleeting for him as for any new inmate or cop recruit. Confronting the lie was so painful he had to believe it to ease the strain.

‘Do the Germans have a word for blitzkrieg, Benny? It’s been naggin’ me since we left the cop den.’

‘We’re on itchy ground here, Chief,’ squeaked Benny uncertainly.

‘Do my shell-like ears deceive me, Benny? Skittish at a brace o’ cadavers? I’ll have you know better than I do –’ and he gestured to the bodies around the bank entrance ‘- these folk are in a better place.’

‘Some of ’em are maybe burnin’ in hell, Chief.’

‘What did I just say.’

The sky flickered.

‘And why are you so goddamn edgy?’ added Blince as they hit the edit. The evidence of their senses fitzed and sputtered, shorting into a vertigo vortex of TV static - the two cops were almost at the point of thinking for themselves when the scene cut in again. They were back on solid illusion.

The bank stood before them, undamaged and empty of corpses. Any modifications had been voided by the restart. In place of the smoked bulletproof glass of the Highrise was the cheap whiteness of styrofoam. There was no cop back-up in the street behind them and the street was unblemished by name or crater.

There was a long-term kickback to the Mall’s twenty-four-hour loop. The theory was that the lack of any lasting consequence would maintain the dull ache of disempowerment familiar from the outer world, but here the absence of effect was so immediate even slabheads perceived it and felt a sense of carefree surrender at no longer having to delude themselves on the issue. The instant the new day kicked in, Blince received a deafening volley of laughter in his right ear - he and Benny were surrounded by some of the most savage louts to have slid whooping down the bell curve. The bastards in question took unblushing advantage of Blince’s surprise and Benny’s distress. Unrelieved years of polychrome abjection turned to hard fury and hit the cops like a diamond anvil. Splinters of panic broke out of the sky.

Blince registered the situation with a flummer of his pixellated jowls and, in a sluggish attempt to pull in the reins, began shooting people for all he was worth. Every gunflash was like a fluorescence bomb and knocked the target to crimson pieces. The broad sweep of his firearm took in bomb zombies, pandemonials and others who had deemed morality a woefully inadequate protection against the modern world. Better guttural cries and stabbing daggers than a shapeless apprehension, thought Blince. ‘But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ he bellowed aside.

Benny heard nothing above his own screams and fired his snubgun with less and less discretion, unreality muffling the reverb. A gridgirl with what appeared to be a sawn-off belly gun put a salvo in his direction and exploded like a doll stuffed with meat. The street ran with berserkers and sim flames of rubine red. He was dazzled by strobe light.

Blince caught a glimpse of Benny being bundled into a cartoon car which roared off, flattening rioters. The bodies were as viscous as a Dali watch, sticking like gum to Blince’s boots. Running, he thought about bugs and their external skeleton. Charmless but happy. People meanwhile buried their bones as deep inside as was physically possible. What were the creeps trying to hide?

Smoking a shock absorber, twitching once for each nerve in his body and speaking artlessly from a technocrazed heart, Download laid out the scam. He’d hacked the Mall less than twenty-four hours ago and had been preparing to shoot up with a jolt gun when the cops bellied in. Jones tendered a dozen rounds at the intruders, who objected reedily while subsiding to the floor. ‘Admit it - you liked it,’ Jones had sniggered as he strapped them semiconscious into the VR rigs, the most convenient fixture of restraint. Then it occurred to him to goggle the cops and open the Mall. The more he thought about it, the more suspect and enjoyable the notion seemed.

This was Jones all over. There’s a story concerning Download and the slabhead Brute Parker which illustrates the Jones rip. Parker had owned the all-night gun shop on the comer of Dive, and when it was burned to a shadow by the cops he attempted to wreak vengeance upon the downtown cop den and everyone in it. The heartfelt plan went awry and Parker went freelance as a hitman. His clients ranged from the IRS to the mob. On one occasion the oil industry hired him to kill the inventor of a car that was fuelled by depression. The moguls didn’t know how to profit from such a cheap and abundant resource. After ventilating the inventor, Parker went to bomb the depression-fuelled car as per contract, but couldn’t resist trying it out. Due to the boneshattering rage he expressed at the drop of a hat he hadn’t enough depression to fill a bird’s ear - the motor whined but never caught. Parker torched the target’s house but towed the vehicle home and brought in Download to take a look. It was a drophead Spider with a biofeedback net, four-wheel drive and a wetware graft engine. Download retuned the graft net for anger and ignorance in a split-propulsion system. Anger ran the front wheels and ignorance the rear. Strapped in, Parker found himself start-stopping like a learner, the rear and front bidding for control. He was thrown repeatedly against the dash, his anger and confusion fuelling the process in the most vicious of circles. Jones pedaled alongside on a tricycle, braying with laughter and shouting that Parker could stop the car by feeling a sense of calm. Parker was over the state line before seeing that rather than transcend his stupidity and rage, all he need do was synchronize them. It had been the formula for complacent brutality since the year dot. In a moment of rare gratitude, Parker drew off his mirror shades, uncovering the gun-metal grey of his eyes. That was enough to convince Download he should never sell used eggs again.

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.