Читать книгу Toxicology - Steve Aylett - Страница 4

“What were you doing in Washington, Atom?”

“Visiting my rights.”

“Wiseguy, eh?”

“Where were you on June 16?” asked the second cop.

“Hiding a pod in the basement.”

“Wiseguy,” muttered the first, nodding.

Nice day—sunny outside and I hadn’t bled much. I was sat in a yelling cell as a bullet lost its flavor in my leg. The two stooges had me jacked to a polygraph. I’d breezed the Wittgenstein controls and we were fronting off to beat the band.

“I get a phonecall? Need to send a singing telegram to my rabbi.”

“You keep northin’ us Chief Blince’ll tear you a new asshole.”

“I need a new asshole—how soon can he get here?”

“You got a gun called a Glory Hand, Atom?”

I rolled a nicotine patch and lit it up. “Okay fellas, you got me. I’ll tell it like it happened. Now let’s see.”

And I spun the following, beginning with my habitation of an office on Saints Street and nothing doing. People think my business is all swapping the clever with rich clients bathchair-bound in a hothouse of flycatchers and septic orchids. Missing daughters and like that. In fact, I was just sat in contemplation when the phone rang. Siri Moonmute sounding wired.

Siri explained that she was now wanted for everything. She had never been into the perfect crime as she didn’t go for Gautier’s principle of virtue in correctness of form. I knew a girl could be perfect because of her flaws. The whole thing was subjective.

Siri was into purity—this it was possible to quantify. A pure crime is like a diamond in which no facet or depth is clouded by legality. It’s criminally saturated, every move from start to finish creating a breach in legislation. This was a headcrime Siri had pondered increasingly of late and with laws entering the statute books at a rate of thousands per year, it was getting easier all the time. So she’d done it, packing as many offenses as possible into each second. Her name smeared the copnet like a rash.

Siri started in on how the difficulties of evading detection were no longer an inducement and she’d been hurting for a new challenge, at which I remarked if she wasn’t careful she’d be sat cod-eyed in a bodyvan. Siri spoke in awe of the particle-science phenomenon of the singularity; a point at which all known laws broke down. If a substance was supposed to expand, in a singularity it contracted. If light was meant to bend, in a singularity it was stiff as a board. Where laws were created to explain behavior these squirls occurred every few months; but where laws were created to prevent behavior—like among people—they happened many times per second. The latter laws were patently inaccurate, and a pure crime was a statement of unmixed truth.

“Siri,” I stated, “don’t you understand that the cops will stick it in and break it off at a speed which will surprise everyone? Such pristine behavior as you display is the sole preserve of a mutant in a belfry.”

Siri remarked that I had failed to gauge the full extent to which she was gung-ho. She was chock full of that quality and would express it at the drop of a hat. “There was a point there, Atom, I’d set things up so that I was committing several hundred offenses in one instant, and I could feel the very atmosphere change—it was as though my misdemeanors had reached such a superdensity that they began to implode.”

“Like a black hole, collapsing in on itself?”

“Exactly.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like god. Could you come over?”

By the time I got there the area was under containment by the cops. Behind them a hole in space spiralled like the water spinning down a drain, a tornado of light sucking scraps of paper and nuggets of masonry out of view.

The trooper boy Marty Nada was stood at the cordon tape yelling through a bullhorn so I went to ask him the deal. He didn’t bother to lower the bullhorn. “Oh hi, Atom. Ah it’s a singularity of some kind, its gravity so powerful not even lies can escape. We’ve lost five officers going near that thing.”

“How’d it happen, they know?”

“Still guessing. Pun gun misfire? Etherics? Eschaton rifle’d do it, right person.”

“Uh, okay thanks Marty.”

“Sure Atom.”

Well, another day another dollar. But it has a bearing upon what happened the following afternoon when I got an out-of-town yell from the Caere Twins. These bottle-bald cuties were crime stylists who monitored the scene for crimes that went outside the known taxonomy of offense. A wholly new crime was rare and precious as white gold. They were camped out in Washington with the theory that a target moved least at the axis. I split the border to face with them in an apartment so small they had to sleep in the mirror. The place really served as a digital gun foundry. Forcing the gun scene from industry to desktop, the Crime Bill had freed it up for limitless configuration. The Twins were among the many who innovated firearms on the fly.

“Siri sent an ‘eyes only’ letter,” they chirped in unison. “With real eyes.”

The Twins gave me some tech laced with sarcasm so heavily encrypted it never really thawed into effect. It was like being flogged with a double helix. I finally extracted the fact that Siri had sent them an email just before her crescendo, but the feed had been jacked to their forge at the time and the message funnelled into a blank skeleton gun which had lain ready for impression.

“What was the message?”

“A command trail,” they said. “Two million keystrokes.”

“All this theory’s like eating hair,” I whined, impatient. Then the truth sunflared over my brainlobes—the only way to achieve the offense density Siri craved was to hack it, initiating a thousand thefts, frauds and intrusions in a split second. The program she created to do it now informed the design of the gun cooling in the Twins’ forge. They opened the panel and retrieved a firearm resembling a tin ammonite with a chicaned barrel and pupstock Steyr grip. Spiral cylinders were real fashionable then. All part of life’s kitsch tapestry.

“Etheric sampler in the butt,” said the Twins. “This gat’s her legacy and culmination, shadowboy, her tub of warm ashes. She’d want to be home.”

“You mean I should take it back and scatter the ammo? No, not me. The cops are right about a gun eventually getting used whether or not there’s a reason.”

“True of theirs, shadowboy. Be careful.”

My car had been replaced with an inflatable replica which burst when I put the key in the door. So I was on a clunker train to Beerlight. Carriage to myself until this big guy in gut braces bellies in. Looks at the empty seats, then lumbers right over to me, dropping down opposite. Regards me with a head like a throw cushion as the light and dark pass over us both.

“Staring is its own reward.”

“It certainly is.” In the pocket of my full-length void coat, the ammo-guzzler zinged against my palm.

“Shave the fuzz from the face of a moth, and what do you get?”

“Fatty Arbuckle?”

“Think again.”

“You?”

“On the nose. Tubs Fontanel’s the name. Fontanel by name, fontanel by nature. Retired cop but I keep my eyes open. Know why I consider myself always on cop duty?”

“Any impediment to imitation’d throw you back on your laboring character?”

“Nah. Watch this.” He hauled himself up, stood in the aisle, and started throwing flat, startled shapes with his arms and legs. This galoot danced like a cartoon robot. Then he sat down, panting and chuffed. “Know where I learnt to dance that way?”

“The laughing academy?”

“Nah.” He took out what looked like a cell phone. “Know what this is?”

“Scrambler hotline to the circus?”

“Nah. Two-end scanner. I hear about a ventilation job I go round and scan the floor pattern. All began two years ago. I was flippin’ through crime scene photos—you know, chalk body outlines on the floor? Got this flickerbook effect, like the outline man was dancin’. And I thought—get a choreographer in here, we’re sittin’ on a goldmine. Got dance numbers from every month last year. Multiple homicides I string together for, like, big production numbers. That thing I just did? Combination o’ fifty crime scenes, January, central DC. I’m based in DC but I just hear about the fashionable events in Beerlight, yeah? Vortex, goofy crime scene, chalkline’s a doozy, wanna record it. You from Beerlight? How’s the local color?”

“Red.”

“I get it. You got the chair there? We got gas in Washington. Folk say the killin’ jar’s just as cold-blooded as some homicides, but I think it’s a crime of passion. Yeah rare’s the day I forget to bless those who gave us a blank check on enforcement. Them and the bicthought media. Support us you’re objective, criticize us you’re biased. I could point to a dozen trite precedents. But the respect ain’t there. What happened to faith in a higher authority?”

“Burned in a wicker man?”

“Nah. Average Beerlighter’s got a morality like a ferris wheel. What is it with you people? You hear me, boy? It’ll be shuffleboard and orange walls before you realize you’re runnin’ naked through an alligator ranch ...”

His words had galvanized me into sleep—boredom was always the heaviest rock in the law’s armory. And I dreamt I was a clown driving a dynamite truck. Cliff edges blurred like sawteeth. Siri was sat next to me in red-fleck dungarees. “What did the Twins say?” she asked calmly. “Was it more art than science or was it based on exacting principles?”

“C-c-can’t you see I don’t give a damn about that?” I shrieked, wrenching the wheel, and the tires blew out, waking me.

Tubs Fontanel was dressed the same as Siri from the dream, and looking as astonished as an inevitably snipered senator. Arterial blood misted and swirled between us, settling in a soft rain. I’d blown a hole in my thigh. The retired cop’s bewilderment was perfectly apparent. “What the f ...”

I bowed to his judgment so fast his nose broke. The train was grinding into the station. He was snuffling something about paraffin and death as I leapt to the platform and made for the barrier with a few dozen others. I included a bullet now, and a thin gore trail. Yelling behind me—I turned to see Tubs bent over, gasping, light falling into him and being extinguished. He was a vacuum. Through the barrier, feeling squirly.

As I crossed the concourse everything was incredibly high- res. I could see infringement thresholds overlapping as people jumped queues, threw punches, glared—every head a poisoned chalice. Kirlian stormfronts collided around the rushing crowds. Mindmade law lines crisscrossed the air, weak and tangled as gossamer. As I passed through they shrivelled and vanished like burning hair. I stashed the gat in a locker, and blew.

Back at my barnacle-encrusted office I told the whole thing to my girlfriend and technical adviser, and she said it couldn’t have been more Freudian if the gun had gone off as I went into a tunnel. I told her Freud was projecting, she kicked me in the balls and I blacked out for sixteen hours, waking only when the cops arrived.

“And that’s how I ended up in a yelling cell with you guys,” I told the two interrogators affably.

“So you wouldn’t know why the President was found with his head in the mouth of an embalmed Kodiak bear. Utterly naked and quite dead. Five yards of Chinese firecrackers up his ass.” They showed me photos of the crime scene.

“Can I keep these?”

“Atom, your story ain’t even halfway good. And void without material proof. But we can bust open every last safe locker in Beerlight Grand and if we find a gun, we’ll do you as an accessory to the Siri job. We got you either way.”

The cops soon decided my death was unnecessary—something I’d been thinking for years. I could have said anything and breezed the polygraph, the Siri bullet handling the conscience response. But it wasn’t a heroic dose—the gunshot was accidental, motiveless, self-inflicted. No intent. The Twins were scornful.

Worst of all, the cops had the gun, though they didn’t know it. There were a thousand lockers in Beerlight station, and a gun in every one.