So, I started playing the flute again this weekend. I was a bit nervous about it as I hadn't really played properly since I was sixteen but I was reminded by a close friend this week that we have very little to fear but fear itself (And spiders of course). But if we actually put ourselves in situations that we are not entirely comfortable with we can find out a lot about ourselves that we didn't know.
It was actually a very positive experience, I'd forgotten far less than I thought and it all came flooding back! Maz chose some really great pieces to get started with and once Em's up and about I think I might give them a quick practice.
Anyway its a good excuse as any to reprint a story I wrote about starting to play the flute which I wrote a good number of years ago. I haven't altered or edited anything in it as its a good reflection of what I was writing at the time. But looking back on it now I see where the cracks and creaks are and wince a touch. but thats what growth it about I suppose.
Origins of a flautist
As most male endeavours have been over the span of human history, I started playing the flute to impress girls, sort of. Well one girl in particular, lets call her F.
F. was everything to me as most school yard first crushes are. Even though I knew little of the ways of love I knew that it must be that feeling she gave me every time she smiled. What else could this exquisite burning in my chest be?
She was in the year above me and my sun rose and set with her coming and goings. In the multiplex of my mind I saw every time I had past her in the corridor and in slow motion got to replay that one sweet time I queued behind her in the canteen, close enough to smell the coconut shampoo she used, whilst she giggled in front of me with her friends.
I should point out I didn't spend my time running from one side of the school to another just to catch a glimpse of her like some kind of hormonally charged stalker. There were other considerations in my school life at the time including football, sweet shops and bunking off.
When I saw her it was a rare treat I savoured rather than trying to gorge myself on an excess of her.
I listened to a lot of music even then, my friends and I would always be discussing albums and bands swapping copied tapes back and forth like we're meant to believe the kids today are swapping STD's. Eventually talk came around to starting our own band and I was given the task of both buying and learning the bass.
I rushed home sure that Mum and Dad, both being musical, would be overjoyed that I was going to become a famous rock star. To say they were under whelmed would be an understatement. I think they were afraid one of two things would happen;
I would buy a bass, get bored and leave it to gather dust in a corner, or I would play it so much and at such a volume that the structure of our house would age prematurely and bring the roof down on our heads.
A compromise was sought in that if I could play a non-offensive (non-guitar) instrument for a year they would think about buying a bass. Unhappy but unable to afford the bass myself I agreed to their terms. After some internal parental debate they presented me with a flute.
I was shocked. I couldn't even conceive of an instrument less bass like. Instead of striding the world like a rock behemoth, making the foundations of the world itself tremble, I would be playing a poncy version of a recorder, sideways, with my cheeks all bunched up and my lower lip sticking out like some kind of wanton child.
However, knowing my parents well enough that once a decision was reached, however stupid or ill advised, that would be the course of action that would be taken I kept to our bargain.
So I took the metal stick and started taking the regulation lessons in school as was stipulated in my contract with the parental unit. Imagine my surprise when I attended the first band practice, was directed to a seat in the flute section and F. sat down right next to me.
My panicking heart didn't even have time to recover from the sheer nearness of her before she turned to me smiled and said "Hi, you new?"
The burdensome flute changed in that instant to a key unlocking that which I truly most desired, contact with F.
Less than 2 months later, my friends abandoned the idea of forming a band and I had no need to stay in the band, as my bass playing skills or lack thereof were no longer required. But I kept at the flute so I could stay in the band and stay near to F.
Twice a week at lunch for 6 years I played the flute and had fun with F. My near obsession for her mellowed into something deeper more tangible and more adult. We became really good friends and apart from the odd half joking half serious valentines card my ardour was happily quenched.
A succession of boyfriends came and went but I was always there before during and after. I got to share so much more with her than I ever could have done as a potential suitor.
When she left school, a year ahead of me I simply stopped going to band. I started avoiding the confused music teacher, to whom I gave no warning of my musical defection, cleaned out my flute and placed it at the back of my wardrobe.
There it staid, wrapped in its red faux-velvet lining, until another group of friends decided to form a band and this time I already knew the instrument I was going to play.
There. That wasn't so bad was it? *shiver*
Anyway so friday we had dinner as payment for a very enjoyable flute lesson feature a one two whammy of Cottage pie and Cheesecake. We introduced Maz to the world of Dirty Word Scrabble. Extra points are awarded for the rude words. (In one game we still discuss Em got Quim on a triple word score!)
Saturday I biked up to Llandernog and back which was really rewarding/knackering but I'm not so bad today, it'll be tomorrow when the aches really come! We had a housekeeping day and went for a two hour wander around town finding all these really lovely od streets and quiet spots in town. The sun was just fabulously warming. And we finished off the day with the first barbeque of the season back at Rob and carolines helping them finish off some homemade burgers! Yay!
When the sun shines the world feels like a different place. I love how green this part of the country is and I wouldn't change it for the world but its nice to get some proper sun now and again.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Switch Three
In the grey industrial depths of the city, in a drab corner of a forgotten warehouse, something not completely human stirred.
Kein blinked. His soaring high was starting to fade, the ecstasy in his arm mellowing to a throbbing pulse that he knew would soon bring the pain again. He flexed the new hand, still marvelling at the chrome skin. He could feel the power the surgical procedure had given him flowing through the limb into the rest of his body. As he admired his glistening prize, he caught his reflection in the silvery palm, bringing him up short.
A tangle of matted wires hung out of the crown of his head, each one leading to a gently sparking end. One eye burned like a white hot inferno whilst the other stared back, blackened and dead. The skin was a patchwork of bright metal, dull plastic and greying flesh. His nose had been replaced with a metallic pressure valve and every tungsten tooth in his mouth had a tan ceramic neighbour. His augmented jaw could bite clean through metal but his stomach could not yet process it. Maybe that would be the next purification he should undergo. He smiled and sparked his teeth together producing a grinding sound. In Kein's head it played like a melody, a siren song of change and escape.
The hand had been surgically attached three days ago but the transplant buzz was already beginning to wear off. When the Reverend had explained his purpose to him all those months ago, the pleasure had lasted for weeks at a time. Changing small parts, something no-one would notice, a patch of skin on his flank, a toe. The knowledge that he had changed and no-one could see it was heaven to him, keeping him warm and contented for a month or two before he had to change again.
Now it was only a matter of days before he needed the fix and hiding it had become more and more difficult, until he didn't care anymore. He'd proudly display his latest modification, the sharp thrill of secret knowledge changing to the sledgehammer blow of confrontation. Walking down the street now, people would stare at him in disgust or avert their gaze. Some would hurl abuse at this self made monster.
He was too important to care about those people now for he was the Messiah. Hadn't his God told him so?
But change cost money and with each procedure becoming more and more extreme, the cost was rising sharply. Kein was out of cash but he needed the next fix, the next change, and he knew somewhere that always had money...
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I had decided not to mention the neural nets at Carterhouse to anyone. Looking back, I realise it was the one decision that could have prevented the terrible events that were to overshadow the entire population several months later. But when it comes to hindsight we all have perfect vision. I made what I thought was the right call at the time.
I thought the computers linked to the mind of every man who'd been at that school posed no threat, provided none of the people wearing the nets saw that one single page in one of the most obscure books ever published. In order not to destroy the reputation of some of the most important people in society I kept quiet.
I can be really, really stupid sometimes.
But that was yet to come. I'd left my wife early this morning sleeping the sleep of an untroubled conscience, a luxury some of us will never know again. I walked the old familiar streets for a few hours feeling the city warming and waking to the caress of the new sun. I met Remy, in a pleasant cafe I knew in the deep recesses of Stepney.
The cafe owner owed me a favour or two from my time tabbing the beat, back when people still got attacked for the colour of their skin. Jules Montague hadn't been in the country long enough to know that a gang of white pond scum rarely want to know the time when they ask for it. The glitter of his gold watch when he reflexively moved his sleeve was all the motivation they needed to attack.
I was walking my beat solo and happened across the four of them standing over the prone Jules. Three of them were using his head like a football the other was going through the suitcase he'd carried all the way from the airport. They turned their attention from the stricken man to the lone copper and grinning, came for me. There are two ways to deal with this.
The law says "Talk to them, talk at them, try to reason with them, calm the situation down.".
The gut says "Fuck 'em. They need to be taught they can't get away with this.".
Four on one were bad odds. They never had a chance.
The first pulled out a small knife that glinted in his hand. A definite mistake. My expanding baton took it out of his grip on the downstroke and snapped his head back on the return. As he collapsed his mate flew at me, leg extended, to try and kick me to the ground. A quick sidestep and a dropped shoulder into his exposed groin had him clutching at his valuables on the ground, crying incoherently.
The other two approached more cautiously, fanning out so I had to step carefully over their fallen comrades. I waited for either one of them to make a move. The shorter one gave in first and threw a punch, I dodged, grabbed his hand and used his own weight to force him to the floor, feeling the bones in his wrist snap and break beneath my gloves.
The fourth turned to run just as Jules flung out an arm and sent him sprawling to the pavement.
I'd put two of them in hospital and the other two in the station and Jules had never forgotten.
He opened a cafe just around he corner from where he'd been 'welcomed' into the neighbourhood, and it was my routine to stop in when I was having a slow morning.
Jules strolled to our table, his dark weather-beaten face broken only by a giant beaming smile.
"There ya go Jim," he said, dropping off a bagel for me and a full breakfast for Remy. "On the house."
I matched his smile with my own. This was a little dance we did for the sake of propriety.
"Can't accept it Jules, that's bribery."
"Bribery? Pah! Can't have you two fighting the forces of darkness on empty stomachs, it wouldn't be right."
He beamed again and swung back to behind the counter, both of us knowing full well I'd leave exact change plus tip on the side plate on my way out.
I was feeling quite at peace with the world and Remy was sitting opposite me waving a fork full of greasy pig products and pontificating on one of his favourite subjects, history.
" ...and that was the point at which they said 'No more' and confined us to Earth until we learn to grow up. Now we have to notify them of every satellite we launch otherwise it just gets vaporised as soon as it hits the ionosphere."
I had heard this story many time before.
Not very long ago man had commanded the solar system, sending ships and men out to Mars and Jupiter. One of our deep range probes had attracted the attention of a race we knew as the Isturi. These beings of pure energy had come to our small cluster of planets and found a semi-evolved race still fighting petty wars, harbouring animalistic instincts and generally behaving like spoilt children.
They were several eons ahead of our technology and light years ahead of us evolutionarily, having moved beyond the need for actual physical form. They appeared as objects of incandescent light too powerful to actually look at.
The Isturis' horror at our bestial savagery soon turned into stewardship. They informed humanity that we would not be allowed to leave the planet until we were worthy of the honour. Once we satisfy them that we will cause no further harm to ourselves or others, we'll be let loose upon the galaxy. They refer to this state of being as Enlightenment. It's hard to argue with beings that can destroy entire cities with a single thought. It was just lucky that they're a peaceful race and didn't decide we were entirely beyond redemption.
Remy was halfway through his second sausage and his theory on why we'd never achieve the Isturi's arbitrary criteria for becoming enlightened when my phone rang.
"Prophet."
"Jim, Its Alan."
My direct supervisor and conduit to the boss.
"Hi Alan, what's up?"
"Drop whatever you're doing and get over to the hospital. We've got another one of your cases, I'll meet you there. Don't take all day, the situation's getting worse."
The phone went dead.
By 'your cases', Alan meant the unusual, strange or just plain bizarre workload I often found myself saddled with. I seemed to be getting a reputation for handling the things no-one else wanted to touch with a barge pole. The more strange stuff I dealt with, the more came my way. It was a feedback loop of oddness that also meant I was really allowed a lot of leeway to handle the heap of crap my own way. The brass generally didn't want to know too much about the freaky problems themselves or how I'd solved them.
"Time to go," I said, slurping what was left of my strong tea.
Remy crammed as much food as he could into his mouth, I dropped twenty bucks on the table and the two of us piled into the car and headed out onto the crowded streets. Jules shot us a wave knowing we would have good reason for leaving abruptly.
London had changed a lot over the years. The occupation and eventual blossoming of England into the 53rd state of America had introduced many changes. Some were good, some were bad but the traffic around London's gnarled streets and alleys would never change. I had heard rumours that initially after the occupation there was a plan to stamp the grid system onto the city in the same way you'd brand a cattle, but the plan never came to fruition. My theory was somebody up high worked out that if you took away the residents main source of complaint they'd soon find something else to bitch about.
As we flashed through USS Constitution Square with the sirens wailing, I was able to cut through most of the traffic. When you had the blues and twos going most drivers would find at least a little extra room to get out of the way. I'd pounded these pavements for so long I knew more about these streets than the cabbies did. Even though the gridlock was pretty bad we eventually wound our way through the stationary traffic and into the London Free Hospital to be met by a heaving mob of people.
Utilizing my police drivers training and a couple of decades of experience, I abandoned the car half on the kerb and we started to push our way through the protesters. I tried to make sense of what they were chanting but it was only once I'd made it through the baying crowd I could see their banners read "Human Rights!" and "Cast out the machine!".
"Just our luck to get caught up in a Ludd demonstration," muttered Remy in my ear.
The Ludds were the latest incarnation of the anti-machine lobby that were convinced we could all go back to subsistence farming and knitting our own yoghurt. Morons. Why they were protesting in front of a hospital I had no idea. Maybe they thought a nice herbal poultice and a round of meditation could cure cancer and all these machines were keeping good honest witch doctors out of work. In their view humanity was being sidelined by technology and the Ludd called for humanity not to be eclipsed by its own creations.
We reached the ring of uniformed officers keeping the baying crowd from destroying the front entrance. Remy grabbed the nearest one, showed his badge and said, "What's all this about?!"
In spite of the pressure of the crowd the uniform grinned. It wasn't often that he knew more than ranking officers. "The DI will fill you in," he shouted over the noise, "He's in the casualty ward."
Alan, or DI Roberts as his ID badge said, was waiting for us at the entrance to the bays. A tall man with a freshly ironed air about him, he was standing in front of one of the privacy curtains for the beds. There was an awful smell emanating from somewhere, even more so than usual for hospitals. A filthy metallic smell.
"Jim, I see you met your welcoming committee out front."
"Alan, what the hell is going on?"
Without further ado DI Roberts whipped the curtain away to reveal a dark mess of machine and body parts. It was as if a car had crashed through a slaughterhouse and was merged by some horrid force into a welded mass of meat and metal. It was only when the head turned towards us that I realised it was or had been human. Fighting back my revulsion I stepped forward.
"My name's Jim Prophet, son," I said, mainly to disguise the noise of Remy being violently sick behind me. "Who did this to you?"
Eyes with no human feeling in them fixed mine while his lips pulled back in what I took to be a smile of pleasure or a rictus of pain displaying rows of uneven metal and ceramic teeth.
"I did this to myself."
I'd heard some stories in my time, but Keins was probably the oddest.
He'd been born normally like you or I but always felt there was something wrong, something clearly alien about himself.
He was told that the alienation he was feeling was all part of growing up, but he knew differently. He couldn't relate to people, to their experiences and he knew that they considered him strange. Drugs hadn't helped. They'd made him much much worse. All that paranoia had boiled over into violence and he'd received a court order to clean up or go to jail.
As part of his rehab Kein started going to a church and ended up a regular at a chapel on Yelena Street called "The Temple of the Transformed Man." The priest there had shown him the simple truth he had been missing for all those years. Improving a small part of oneself every day brought one got closer to God.
To my mind Kein had misunderstood the part about improving yourself. He'd taken it literally and started replacing perfectly decent parts of his body with machine counterparts in an effort to be more holy.
Desperate for cash to pay for another alteration he'd been caught trying to rob a convenience store. Kein had been shot twice before he'd thrown the owner through a solid wall. His augmented strength and the reinforced concrete meant the human basic owner didn't really have a chance.
Tears of pure black ran over Keins mottled cheeks, wiped away by a hand of silver metal, "I didn't want to kill anyone! I just needed the money to change! I just tried to get him out of the way."
The mob outside knew that the shopkeeper had been killed by something other than human and were using it as a platform to incite violence. We always fear that which we don't understand. We put any name to it that we want, racism, fascism, sexism, it all boils down to loathing that which we can't comprehend.
I left the cubicle feeling sick to my stomach but not at the appearance of the being that had used to be a man. A very wise man once said "Religious conviction is the only thing that that can make good men perform evil deeds." Kein clearly had some psychological flaw where he saw everything in need of improvement and change.
Remy, also looking a little green around the gills, was standing in the corner waiting for me. I gave him the short version and we headed out to Yelena Street to see the priest who had started this whole business.
On the way out I grabbed the nearest doctor who was still trying to avoid looking at the half man, half machine, cluttering up his neat clean emergency room.
"Make sure he sees a psychiatrist."
The young man smirked.
"Actually, I was thinking of calling a mechanic."
I'd spent a fair amount of time around doctors and their trademark black humour which they called a 'coping mechanism'. I called it puerile schoolboy wit masked as something deeper.
"Funny. He's suffering from Surgical Addiction and Body Dysmorphic Syndrome."
He shot me a look that spoke a thousand medical volumes.
"Look them up." I said turning on my heel and striding towards the exit.
Remy had the decency of waiting until we were past the entrance and the riled up mob, before asking me what I was on about.
"He's suffering from a mental disease where he sees the flesh as flawed and wants to replace every part of it to make himself more holy."
"More holy?"
"Yep," I replied, "We're going to church."
The frontage of the temple was nondescript and dully painted, only a notice board proclaiming it the 'Temple of the Transformed Man' let you know it wasn't an office building. As we walked into the entrance of the church the small windows let in angled shafts of light that barely penetrated the darkness. There was a heavy smell in the air like burning oil and incense. A background hum droned from every corner which sounded like static, and I realised it was a thousand recorded voices chanting a litany of praises, a mechanised Tibetan prayer wheel eternally cycling. Remy looked around.
"Hello?" he shouted, his voice carrying strangely in the unformed darkness.
The hall lights flashed on, dazzling us, as a clear sharp voice rang out.
"Welcome, stranger! You have come seeking the truth."
The church was deeper than it looked from outside. Dark red carpets led to the pews and then onto an altar of a burnished metal shining in the artificially bright light. A hologram of an android, carefully featureless, shimmered into life in front of us.
"In a manner of speaking," I began,"My name's DI Prophet and this is DI Bouchalant. We're looking for whomever's in charge here."
The lights dimmed slightly, a door to the left of the altar sprang open and the voice called out, "Please step through into my chambers."
We walked into a small spartan space containing nothing but a table and chairs, where a hooded figure was sitting at the table with his face hidden from view. The same metallic voice, now much quieter, asked us to sit.
"My name is Father Xerces. You'll have to excuse my robe gentlemen, but I'm afraid my appearance can be too much for some people."
A single red dot shone out from under the hood but that was all that was visible beneath the dark lip of his robe.
"We're police officers sir. We're used to that kind of thing."
"That's kind, but I'll remain in the shadows if I may. I was in an industrial accident that destroyed the left side of my body and most of my face. I couldn't afford the bills for vat grown replacements so they bolted metal and untarnishable alloys to my skin and bones. In doing so they healed my body and cleansed my soul. I became complete for the first time in my life. In short, I saw God. And this church is my way of worship. Drawing new sheep into the fold."
"So are you the transformed man that this temple is built to?"
He chuckled. A deeply unsettling metallic sound.
"No. I'm not that egotistical. I'm merely trying to show people that transformation can have a wonderful affect on a person. Changing things about yourself that are faulty or bad can lead to enlightenment."
"Enlightenment through mutilation?"
"It's not strictly the physical I am referring to. If you have a bad defect in your psyche wouldn't you try to change it? But yes I believe that the flesh can be tempted. I believe the flesh is weak. Modifying parts of yourself that cause you to sin can only be a good thing if it leads to no further sin."
I'd thought Kein had misunderstood the preaching of this maniac. It turned out he'd been absolutely correct. Xerces wasn't interested in changing attitudes or moral practices, he was talking about gross physical changes, like the one he had been through. It was a total shock, that made me incredulous.
"Do you know a Mr Kein?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Mr Kein, he attends your church here. He's charged with murder."
"Murder? We are peaceful people officer, we just believe in improving ourselves beyond the transience of the flesh. If Mr Kein has committed a crime I am very sorry for it but it has nothing to do with myself or my church."
"He was robbing a store to raise money for another mutilation...".
He interrupted, "It's not a mutilation if it's a sacrament! 'If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell.' Matthew 5:29."
I didn't feel like telling him that more people had died because of that book than he could ever hope to save.
"Whilst your rights to believe whatever you want are constitutionally protected, when your particular religious viewpoint harms innocents."
"A murder is always a tragedy. I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I'm afraid Kein may have an unbalanced mind..."
"May?"
"...but the implication that his unfortunate crime had anything to do with the church or myself is totally incorrect. We are merely practising our peaceful religion as is our right enshrined in law. The law you gentlemen are sworn to uphold. There's no incitement to violence against non-believers in our creed."
He stood up with a heavy creaking sound. I could see his bare right leg was normal human flesh wearing only a sandal but his left was a tangle of wires and a copperish metal.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave now."
The red probing light in his hood had increased in intensity, glaring as if angry although his artificial voice remained measured and calm.
"If we have any further questions Father..."
"Then I will be right here. I have nothing to hide."
"Except your face," I thought, uncharitably.
The lamps had been turned off in the main body of the church. We, as the unenlightened and lacking augmented vision, clearly did not see the light. We staggered out of the oily darkness into the blessed air of the city proper.
I turned to Remy.
"We'll have to come back to see if his peaceful rhetoric changes for a more receptive audience."
He lit one of those foul French cigarettes he was unable to shake and nodded at me.
Remy and I would stand out a mile at one of these meetings but luckily I knew someone who was perfect for fitting in with a machine-loving crowd, or Modders as the Ludds would call them.
"No. No. No. No. No. Not as a favour, not as an assignment, not even as an order, Jim. I simply won't do it."
Delyth was initially reluctant to go undercover to the service. After I explained to her the nature of the query she soon warmed up to the idea. She was intrigued how humans could take technology and turn it into a religion with its own rituals, services and offerings.
That night we returned to the temple, Delyth and I walked into together. She had a halo of tarnished metal floating above her head on repulsors and an artfully decorated dragon tattoo stretched across her bare shoulders and over the left side of her face. I had my own fake facial markings, that of a new Zealand tribe from many centuries before. She assured me that if Father Xerces got another look at me, I'd be unrecognisable from the scruffy detective he met this morning. Black bars and talons covered my cheeks and a large stylised eagle seemed to have settled across my forehead.
Delyth had stencilled the designs on herself using an ink that she assured me would wash off with alcohol. When she'd finished my design she stepped back to take a long look.
"You look..."
"Great? Amazing?" I finished, only half joking.
"Different. In a good way." She smiled and our eyes met and glanced away.
Her wardrobe provided the long leather coats that enveloped the rest of our bodies and completed the look. Who knows what kind of modifications they may be hiding?
We went in alone. Remy was waiting on his own around the corner in a borrowed taxi in case we needed to beat a hasty retreat but I didn't want a van full of officers waiting. Number one this wasn't a bust, we simply didn't have enough for a warrant. This was an information gathering exercise. And number two, if one of these worshippers had a short-wave radio implanted in his skull, he might have picked up chatter from the van itself and tipped our hand.
Hundreds of 'Modders' filed into the church which was lit bright against the dark night, giving it a respectability and impressiveness that it lacked in daylight. The congregation was full of weirdoes but plenty of normal folks were chatting away to the people with bits of metal sticking out of their necks. In our own weird way, we blended right in. The lights dimmed as we took our pew and the service itself began.
I'm not religious but I have attended my share of services. For some their faith lends them a sense of place, poise and purpose. It's a constant source of strength and they seem the taller and the prouder for it. In contrast though a lot of people seemed to attend that particular brand of Christianity where you leave your thinking, self-determination and dignity at the door. Unless they're crying, wailing, and beating their breast they don't feel they're being sufficiently sincere enough.
This service was definitely the latter of the two.
I don't think many traditional Catholic priests are greeted with rapturous applause, but Xerces was as he strode across the stage, robe still very much in place. He stopped at the lectern and threw back his hood in a dramatic gesture. The applause rose into a near orgasmic frenzy of cheering.
His face and body were covered in the burnished copper. Where the flesh was still visible it was partially hidden behind the multicoloured wires powering the machine part of him. A metal mask unevenly split his face in two and where the right side was fair skinned and blond haired the left gazed out of a deep red lens, pulling focus on the crowd. His entire mouth was covered by the mask and from the grill holes at the front he began to preach.
"My brothers and sisters, I stand here before you transformed from the wretched sinner I once was! I have changed in spirit as I have changed in body. I could have cursed God for destroyed my weak flesh, but I praised him for fortifying me with metal and fire! The body is not a temple! It's a monument to imperfection!"
He was alive, he was igniting the passions and the feelings of the freaks and the weirdoes, the underclass. They responded with whoops and yells. Arms, human and otherwise were raised aloft.
However inflammatory it was, it wasn't illegal. It wasn't incitement. We couldn't arrest him for talking passionately about his religion.
The basic tenet was as he had explained to Remy and myself, the flesh is weak and corruptible in a way metal could never be. The major errors of the world could be attributed to human weakness not the failure of our machines.
Just then there was a shattering of glass and a rock sailed through the air, landing in the crowd. Remy shouted in the earpiece I'd forgotten I was wearing, "Jim! The Ludds are here!"
Before I could react the wooden doors crashed open as the main body of the Ludds came piling through. They met the first line of Modders and started laying about them with stakes and clubs. They were a ravening horde buoyed up by their righteous anger. These weren't the placard waving protestors hoping to cause a change. These were the arm and the boot of people who felt so threatened they had to lay about the source of the threat with fist and club.
I should have announced I was a police officer. I should have tried to calm the situation down. But they wouldn't have taken me seriously. They would have wrapped a club around my tattooed face.
I moved into the aisle and intercepted the Ludd leading the charge. He ignored my outstretched arm, his face a mask of unleashed fury and I knew he would pound me into the ground given the chance, my facial tattoos marking me as 'alien', as 'that which is to be destroyed'. I ducked under his initial blow and swung back into his solar plexus knocking him cold.
A white light exploded on the left side of my face and I fell heavily. As I rose again I saw Delyth had taken the club that had hit me and was striking back with white-hot anger.
After that it got really bad.
I can remember punching a Ludd and him collapsing into the knave, whacking his head on the wooden pew. I remember feeling a bond of companionship with the modders fighting along side me, a wave of feeling that makes me sick now to think of it. I lost the thing that makes policemen good: control. I was working more on animal instinct than human thought and right beside me, trading blows and punches, was Delyth. Her position as a tech obviously hadn't completely erased her training, as she drop-kicked another Ludd out of contention and into unconsciousness.
In the middle of the chaos Xerces was laying about him with a stave, his red eye gleaming as he spouted exhortations and encouragements to his flock in a most unpriestly like manner. Its the first time I've seen the clergy urging on violence but for him the Ludds represented all the hate and intolerance of their kind. He was paying it back in spades.
A shout went up and Xerces turned just as a thrown half-brick came arching through the air and caught him clean on the metal side of his face.
There was a resounding bang as the metallic mask flew off, exposing what should have been the hideous scarring and augmental electronics it was meant to hide. Except, there were no scars. There were no electronics. The mask hid nothing except perfect skin and another pale blue eye to match its twin.
Xerces had no damage at all. He was a first stage human, as he had been the day he was born.
He spluttered as the room fell silent all gazing at their leader, the man who told them all the wonders of changing. Of altering their bodies to be closer to his. Closer to the divine.
"It's a miracle!" Xerces shouted in his now very human, very nervous voice "I've been cured...." He hadn't even finished the sentence before the first Modder fist impacted on him. In an instant all the freaks and weirdoes turned on him. The ones he'd encouraged. The ones he'd lied to. They thought he'd been leading by example, but they been duped and they were in the mood for revenge.
I used the confusion to make a move to the back door, dragging Delyth behind me. Amid the crowd Xerces gave an all too human scream that was suddenly ended.
We made it past the swarming Ludds to the car, Remy was already gunning the engine and we squealed away from the scene. I looked behind us and saw the church erupt in flames, lighting the night in every direction. Whether it was set by the Ludds or the betrayed Modders I'll never know.
Remy was so shaken he started talking in his native tongue.
"Vous les branleurs qu'anglais sont fous, je jamais devriez avoir la maison gauche!"
"What?" said Delyth, still shaking from the adrenaline.
"He said we're all crazy and he should have stayed at home." I translated absent-mindedly, lost in my own thoughts.
"I'm inclined to agree with him."
We were silent as Remy drove us homeward, knowing we couldn't tell anyone what had happened in there. It had been an unauthorized operation and as it had all gone south it could become very awkward to explain. Especially as I still had Luddite blood on my knuckles.
Remy dropped us off at Delyths apartment and sped away into the night without a further word.
I walked Delyth up to her place, I wasn't sure quite why.
She unlocked her front door and turned to me.
"You don't have to go home you know," she said, her face betraying the tangled emotions beneath the surface.
"Jennifer will be waiting for me," I said simply, the neutral nature of the statement speaking more than words ever could.
"We could have died in there tonight," she said looking straight at me, seeing right through me, "I would never want to end my life thinking 'What if?'."
Before I could respond she turned and walked through her door, leaving it ajar. An invitation, a welcome, a temptation.
I followed her into to her apartment on autopilot, not really knowing what was going to happen next.
I can be really, really stupid sometimes.
Kein blinked. His soaring high was starting to fade, the ecstasy in his arm mellowing to a throbbing pulse that he knew would soon bring the pain again. He flexed the new hand, still marvelling at the chrome skin. He could feel the power the surgical procedure had given him flowing through the limb into the rest of his body. As he admired his glistening prize, he caught his reflection in the silvery palm, bringing him up short.
A tangle of matted wires hung out of the crown of his head, each one leading to a gently sparking end. One eye burned like a white hot inferno whilst the other stared back, blackened and dead. The skin was a patchwork of bright metal, dull plastic and greying flesh. His nose had been replaced with a metallic pressure valve and every tungsten tooth in his mouth had a tan ceramic neighbour. His augmented jaw could bite clean through metal but his stomach could not yet process it. Maybe that would be the next purification he should undergo. He smiled and sparked his teeth together producing a grinding sound. In Kein's head it played like a melody, a siren song of change and escape.
The hand had been surgically attached three days ago but the transplant buzz was already beginning to wear off. When the Reverend had explained his purpose to him all those months ago, the pleasure had lasted for weeks at a time. Changing small parts, something no-one would notice, a patch of skin on his flank, a toe. The knowledge that he had changed and no-one could see it was heaven to him, keeping him warm and contented for a month or two before he had to change again.
Now it was only a matter of days before he needed the fix and hiding it had become more and more difficult, until he didn't care anymore. He'd proudly display his latest modification, the sharp thrill of secret knowledge changing to the sledgehammer blow of confrontation. Walking down the street now, people would stare at him in disgust or avert their gaze. Some would hurl abuse at this self made monster.
He was too important to care about those people now for he was the Messiah. Hadn't his God told him so?
But change cost money and with each procedure becoming more and more extreme, the cost was rising sharply. Kein was out of cash but he needed the next fix, the next change, and he knew somewhere that always had money...
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I had decided not to mention the neural nets at Carterhouse to anyone. Looking back, I realise it was the one decision that could have prevented the terrible events that were to overshadow the entire population several months later. But when it comes to hindsight we all have perfect vision. I made what I thought was the right call at the time.
I thought the computers linked to the mind of every man who'd been at that school posed no threat, provided none of the people wearing the nets saw that one single page in one of the most obscure books ever published. In order not to destroy the reputation of some of the most important people in society I kept quiet.
I can be really, really stupid sometimes.
But that was yet to come. I'd left my wife early this morning sleeping the sleep of an untroubled conscience, a luxury some of us will never know again. I walked the old familiar streets for a few hours feeling the city warming and waking to the caress of the new sun. I met Remy, in a pleasant cafe I knew in the deep recesses of Stepney.
The cafe owner owed me a favour or two from my time tabbing the beat, back when people still got attacked for the colour of their skin. Jules Montague hadn't been in the country long enough to know that a gang of white pond scum rarely want to know the time when they ask for it. The glitter of his gold watch when he reflexively moved his sleeve was all the motivation they needed to attack.
I was walking my beat solo and happened across the four of them standing over the prone Jules. Three of them were using his head like a football the other was going through the suitcase he'd carried all the way from the airport. They turned their attention from the stricken man to the lone copper and grinning, came for me. There are two ways to deal with this.
The law says "Talk to them, talk at them, try to reason with them, calm the situation down.".
The gut says "Fuck 'em. They need to be taught they can't get away with this.".
Four on one were bad odds. They never had a chance.
The first pulled out a small knife that glinted in his hand. A definite mistake. My expanding baton took it out of his grip on the downstroke and snapped his head back on the return. As he collapsed his mate flew at me, leg extended, to try and kick me to the ground. A quick sidestep and a dropped shoulder into his exposed groin had him clutching at his valuables on the ground, crying incoherently.
The other two approached more cautiously, fanning out so I had to step carefully over their fallen comrades. I waited for either one of them to make a move. The shorter one gave in first and threw a punch, I dodged, grabbed his hand and used his own weight to force him to the floor, feeling the bones in his wrist snap and break beneath my gloves.
The fourth turned to run just as Jules flung out an arm and sent him sprawling to the pavement.
I'd put two of them in hospital and the other two in the station and Jules had never forgotten.
He opened a cafe just around he corner from where he'd been 'welcomed' into the neighbourhood, and it was my routine to stop in when I was having a slow morning.
Jules strolled to our table, his dark weather-beaten face broken only by a giant beaming smile.
"There ya go Jim," he said, dropping off a bagel for me and a full breakfast for Remy. "On the house."
I matched his smile with my own. This was a little dance we did for the sake of propriety.
"Can't accept it Jules, that's bribery."
"Bribery? Pah! Can't have you two fighting the forces of darkness on empty stomachs, it wouldn't be right."
He beamed again and swung back to behind the counter, both of us knowing full well I'd leave exact change plus tip on the side plate on my way out.
I was feeling quite at peace with the world and Remy was sitting opposite me waving a fork full of greasy pig products and pontificating on one of his favourite subjects, history.
" ...and that was the point at which they said 'No more' and confined us to Earth until we learn to grow up. Now we have to notify them of every satellite we launch otherwise it just gets vaporised as soon as it hits the ionosphere."
I had heard this story many time before.
Not very long ago man had commanded the solar system, sending ships and men out to Mars and Jupiter. One of our deep range probes had attracted the attention of a race we knew as the Isturi. These beings of pure energy had come to our small cluster of planets and found a semi-evolved race still fighting petty wars, harbouring animalistic instincts and generally behaving like spoilt children.
They were several eons ahead of our technology and light years ahead of us evolutionarily, having moved beyond the need for actual physical form. They appeared as objects of incandescent light too powerful to actually look at.
The Isturis' horror at our bestial savagery soon turned into stewardship. They informed humanity that we would not be allowed to leave the planet until we were worthy of the honour. Once we satisfy them that we will cause no further harm to ourselves or others, we'll be let loose upon the galaxy. They refer to this state of being as Enlightenment. It's hard to argue with beings that can destroy entire cities with a single thought. It was just lucky that they're a peaceful race and didn't decide we were entirely beyond redemption.
Remy was halfway through his second sausage and his theory on why we'd never achieve the Isturi's arbitrary criteria for becoming enlightened when my phone rang.
"Prophet."
"Jim, Its Alan."
My direct supervisor and conduit to the boss.
"Hi Alan, what's up?"
"Drop whatever you're doing and get over to the hospital. We've got another one of your cases, I'll meet you there. Don't take all day, the situation's getting worse."
The phone went dead.
By 'your cases', Alan meant the unusual, strange or just plain bizarre workload I often found myself saddled with. I seemed to be getting a reputation for handling the things no-one else wanted to touch with a barge pole. The more strange stuff I dealt with, the more came my way. It was a feedback loop of oddness that also meant I was really allowed a lot of leeway to handle the heap of crap my own way. The brass generally didn't want to know too much about the freaky problems themselves or how I'd solved them.
"Time to go," I said, slurping what was left of my strong tea.
Remy crammed as much food as he could into his mouth, I dropped twenty bucks on the table and the two of us piled into the car and headed out onto the crowded streets. Jules shot us a wave knowing we would have good reason for leaving abruptly.
London had changed a lot over the years. The occupation and eventual blossoming of England into the 53rd state of America had introduced many changes. Some were good, some were bad but the traffic around London's gnarled streets and alleys would never change. I had heard rumours that initially after the occupation there was a plan to stamp the grid system onto the city in the same way you'd brand a cattle, but the plan never came to fruition. My theory was somebody up high worked out that if you took away the residents main source of complaint they'd soon find something else to bitch about.
As we flashed through USS Constitution Square with the sirens wailing, I was able to cut through most of the traffic. When you had the blues and twos going most drivers would find at least a little extra room to get out of the way. I'd pounded these pavements for so long I knew more about these streets than the cabbies did. Even though the gridlock was pretty bad we eventually wound our way through the stationary traffic and into the London Free Hospital to be met by a heaving mob of people.
Utilizing my police drivers training and a couple of decades of experience, I abandoned the car half on the kerb and we started to push our way through the protesters. I tried to make sense of what they were chanting but it was only once I'd made it through the baying crowd I could see their banners read "Human Rights!" and "Cast out the machine!".
"Just our luck to get caught up in a Ludd demonstration," muttered Remy in my ear.
The Ludds were the latest incarnation of the anti-machine lobby that were convinced we could all go back to subsistence farming and knitting our own yoghurt. Morons. Why they were protesting in front of a hospital I had no idea. Maybe they thought a nice herbal poultice and a round of meditation could cure cancer and all these machines were keeping good honest witch doctors out of work. In their view humanity was being sidelined by technology and the Ludd called for humanity not to be eclipsed by its own creations.
We reached the ring of uniformed officers keeping the baying crowd from destroying the front entrance. Remy grabbed the nearest one, showed his badge and said, "What's all this about?!"
In spite of the pressure of the crowd the uniform grinned. It wasn't often that he knew more than ranking officers. "The DI will fill you in," he shouted over the noise, "He's in the casualty ward."
Alan, or DI Roberts as his ID badge said, was waiting for us at the entrance to the bays. A tall man with a freshly ironed air about him, he was standing in front of one of the privacy curtains for the beds. There was an awful smell emanating from somewhere, even more so than usual for hospitals. A filthy metallic smell.
"Jim, I see you met your welcoming committee out front."
"Alan, what the hell is going on?"
Without further ado DI Roberts whipped the curtain away to reveal a dark mess of machine and body parts. It was as if a car had crashed through a slaughterhouse and was merged by some horrid force into a welded mass of meat and metal. It was only when the head turned towards us that I realised it was or had been human. Fighting back my revulsion I stepped forward.
"My name's Jim Prophet, son," I said, mainly to disguise the noise of Remy being violently sick behind me. "Who did this to you?"
Eyes with no human feeling in them fixed mine while his lips pulled back in what I took to be a smile of pleasure or a rictus of pain displaying rows of uneven metal and ceramic teeth.
"I did this to myself."
I'd heard some stories in my time, but Keins was probably the oddest.
He'd been born normally like you or I but always felt there was something wrong, something clearly alien about himself.
He was told that the alienation he was feeling was all part of growing up, but he knew differently. He couldn't relate to people, to their experiences and he knew that they considered him strange. Drugs hadn't helped. They'd made him much much worse. All that paranoia had boiled over into violence and he'd received a court order to clean up or go to jail.
As part of his rehab Kein started going to a church and ended up a regular at a chapel on Yelena Street called "The Temple of the Transformed Man." The priest there had shown him the simple truth he had been missing for all those years. Improving a small part of oneself every day brought one got closer to God.
To my mind Kein had misunderstood the part about improving yourself. He'd taken it literally and started replacing perfectly decent parts of his body with machine counterparts in an effort to be more holy.
Desperate for cash to pay for another alteration he'd been caught trying to rob a convenience store. Kein had been shot twice before he'd thrown the owner through a solid wall. His augmented strength and the reinforced concrete meant the human basic owner didn't really have a chance.
Tears of pure black ran over Keins mottled cheeks, wiped away by a hand of silver metal, "I didn't want to kill anyone! I just needed the money to change! I just tried to get him out of the way."
The mob outside knew that the shopkeeper had been killed by something other than human and were using it as a platform to incite violence. We always fear that which we don't understand. We put any name to it that we want, racism, fascism, sexism, it all boils down to loathing that which we can't comprehend.
I left the cubicle feeling sick to my stomach but not at the appearance of the being that had used to be a man. A very wise man once said "Religious conviction is the only thing that that can make good men perform evil deeds." Kein clearly had some psychological flaw where he saw everything in need of improvement and change.
Remy, also looking a little green around the gills, was standing in the corner waiting for me. I gave him the short version and we headed out to Yelena Street to see the priest who had started this whole business.
On the way out I grabbed the nearest doctor who was still trying to avoid looking at the half man, half machine, cluttering up his neat clean emergency room.
"Make sure he sees a psychiatrist."
The young man smirked.
"Actually, I was thinking of calling a mechanic."
I'd spent a fair amount of time around doctors and their trademark black humour which they called a 'coping mechanism'. I called it puerile schoolboy wit masked as something deeper.
"Funny. He's suffering from Surgical Addiction and Body Dysmorphic Syndrome."
He shot me a look that spoke a thousand medical volumes.
"Look them up." I said turning on my heel and striding towards the exit.
Remy had the decency of waiting until we were past the entrance and the riled up mob, before asking me what I was on about.
"He's suffering from a mental disease where he sees the flesh as flawed and wants to replace every part of it to make himself more holy."
"More holy?"
"Yep," I replied, "We're going to church."
The frontage of the temple was nondescript and dully painted, only a notice board proclaiming it the 'Temple of the Transformed Man' let you know it wasn't an office building. As we walked into the entrance of the church the small windows let in angled shafts of light that barely penetrated the darkness. There was a heavy smell in the air like burning oil and incense. A background hum droned from every corner which sounded like static, and I realised it was a thousand recorded voices chanting a litany of praises, a mechanised Tibetan prayer wheel eternally cycling. Remy looked around.
"Hello?" he shouted, his voice carrying strangely in the unformed darkness.
The hall lights flashed on, dazzling us, as a clear sharp voice rang out.
"Welcome, stranger! You have come seeking the truth."
The church was deeper than it looked from outside. Dark red carpets led to the pews and then onto an altar of a burnished metal shining in the artificially bright light. A hologram of an android, carefully featureless, shimmered into life in front of us.
"In a manner of speaking," I began,"My name's DI Prophet and this is DI Bouchalant. We're looking for whomever's in charge here."
The lights dimmed slightly, a door to the left of the altar sprang open and the voice called out, "Please step through into my chambers."
We walked into a small spartan space containing nothing but a table and chairs, where a hooded figure was sitting at the table with his face hidden from view. The same metallic voice, now much quieter, asked us to sit.
"My name is Father Xerces. You'll have to excuse my robe gentlemen, but I'm afraid my appearance can be too much for some people."
A single red dot shone out from under the hood but that was all that was visible beneath the dark lip of his robe.
"We're police officers sir. We're used to that kind of thing."
"That's kind, but I'll remain in the shadows if I may. I was in an industrial accident that destroyed the left side of my body and most of my face. I couldn't afford the bills for vat grown replacements so they bolted metal and untarnishable alloys to my skin and bones. In doing so they healed my body and cleansed my soul. I became complete for the first time in my life. In short, I saw God. And this church is my way of worship. Drawing new sheep into the fold."
"So are you the transformed man that this temple is built to?"
He chuckled. A deeply unsettling metallic sound.
"No. I'm not that egotistical. I'm merely trying to show people that transformation can have a wonderful affect on a person. Changing things about yourself that are faulty or bad can lead to enlightenment."
"Enlightenment through mutilation?"
"It's not strictly the physical I am referring to. If you have a bad defect in your psyche wouldn't you try to change it? But yes I believe that the flesh can be tempted. I believe the flesh is weak. Modifying parts of yourself that cause you to sin can only be a good thing if it leads to no further sin."
I'd thought Kein had misunderstood the preaching of this maniac. It turned out he'd been absolutely correct. Xerces wasn't interested in changing attitudes or moral practices, he was talking about gross physical changes, like the one he had been through. It was a total shock, that made me incredulous.
"Do you know a Mr Kein?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Mr Kein, he attends your church here. He's charged with murder."
"Murder? We are peaceful people officer, we just believe in improving ourselves beyond the transience of the flesh. If Mr Kein has committed a crime I am very sorry for it but it has nothing to do with myself or my church."
"He was robbing a store to raise money for another mutilation...".
He interrupted, "It's not a mutilation if it's a sacrament! 'If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell.' Matthew 5:29."
I didn't feel like telling him that more people had died because of that book than he could ever hope to save.
"Whilst your rights to believe whatever you want are constitutionally protected, when your particular religious viewpoint harms innocents."
"A murder is always a tragedy. I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I'm afraid Kein may have an unbalanced mind..."
"May?"
"...but the implication that his unfortunate crime had anything to do with the church or myself is totally incorrect. We are merely practising our peaceful religion as is our right enshrined in law. The law you gentlemen are sworn to uphold. There's no incitement to violence against non-believers in our creed."
He stood up with a heavy creaking sound. I could see his bare right leg was normal human flesh wearing only a sandal but his left was a tangle of wires and a copperish metal.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave now."
The red probing light in his hood had increased in intensity, glaring as if angry although his artificial voice remained measured and calm.
"If we have any further questions Father..."
"Then I will be right here. I have nothing to hide."
"Except your face," I thought, uncharitably.
The lamps had been turned off in the main body of the church. We, as the unenlightened and lacking augmented vision, clearly did not see the light. We staggered out of the oily darkness into the blessed air of the city proper.
I turned to Remy.
"We'll have to come back to see if his peaceful rhetoric changes for a more receptive audience."
He lit one of those foul French cigarettes he was unable to shake and nodded at me.
Remy and I would stand out a mile at one of these meetings but luckily I knew someone who was perfect for fitting in with a machine-loving crowd, or Modders as the Ludds would call them.
"No. No. No. No. No. Not as a favour, not as an assignment, not even as an order, Jim. I simply won't do it."
Delyth was initially reluctant to go undercover to the service. After I explained to her the nature of the query she soon warmed up to the idea. She was intrigued how humans could take technology and turn it into a religion with its own rituals, services and offerings.
That night we returned to the temple, Delyth and I walked into together. She had a halo of tarnished metal floating above her head on repulsors and an artfully decorated dragon tattoo stretched across her bare shoulders and over the left side of her face. I had my own fake facial markings, that of a new Zealand tribe from many centuries before. She assured me that if Father Xerces got another look at me, I'd be unrecognisable from the scruffy detective he met this morning. Black bars and talons covered my cheeks and a large stylised eagle seemed to have settled across my forehead.
Delyth had stencilled the designs on herself using an ink that she assured me would wash off with alcohol. When she'd finished my design she stepped back to take a long look.
"You look..."
"Great? Amazing?" I finished, only half joking.
"Different. In a good way." She smiled and our eyes met and glanced away.
Her wardrobe provided the long leather coats that enveloped the rest of our bodies and completed the look. Who knows what kind of modifications they may be hiding?
We went in alone. Remy was waiting on his own around the corner in a borrowed taxi in case we needed to beat a hasty retreat but I didn't want a van full of officers waiting. Number one this wasn't a bust, we simply didn't have enough for a warrant. This was an information gathering exercise. And number two, if one of these worshippers had a short-wave radio implanted in his skull, he might have picked up chatter from the van itself and tipped our hand.
Hundreds of 'Modders' filed into the church which was lit bright against the dark night, giving it a respectability and impressiveness that it lacked in daylight. The congregation was full of weirdoes but plenty of normal folks were chatting away to the people with bits of metal sticking out of their necks. In our own weird way, we blended right in. The lights dimmed as we took our pew and the service itself began.
I'm not religious but I have attended my share of services. For some their faith lends them a sense of place, poise and purpose. It's a constant source of strength and they seem the taller and the prouder for it. In contrast though a lot of people seemed to attend that particular brand of Christianity where you leave your thinking, self-determination and dignity at the door. Unless they're crying, wailing, and beating their breast they don't feel they're being sufficiently sincere enough.
This service was definitely the latter of the two.
I don't think many traditional Catholic priests are greeted with rapturous applause, but Xerces was as he strode across the stage, robe still very much in place. He stopped at the lectern and threw back his hood in a dramatic gesture. The applause rose into a near orgasmic frenzy of cheering.
His face and body were covered in the burnished copper. Where the flesh was still visible it was partially hidden behind the multicoloured wires powering the machine part of him. A metal mask unevenly split his face in two and where the right side was fair skinned and blond haired the left gazed out of a deep red lens, pulling focus on the crowd. His entire mouth was covered by the mask and from the grill holes at the front he began to preach.
"My brothers and sisters, I stand here before you transformed from the wretched sinner I once was! I have changed in spirit as I have changed in body. I could have cursed God for destroyed my weak flesh, but I praised him for fortifying me with metal and fire! The body is not a temple! It's a monument to imperfection!"
He was alive, he was igniting the passions and the feelings of the freaks and the weirdoes, the underclass. They responded with whoops and yells. Arms, human and otherwise were raised aloft.
However inflammatory it was, it wasn't illegal. It wasn't incitement. We couldn't arrest him for talking passionately about his religion.
The basic tenet was as he had explained to Remy and myself, the flesh is weak and corruptible in a way metal could never be. The major errors of the world could be attributed to human weakness not the failure of our machines.
Just then there was a shattering of glass and a rock sailed through the air, landing in the crowd. Remy shouted in the earpiece I'd forgotten I was wearing, "Jim! The Ludds are here!"
Before I could react the wooden doors crashed open as the main body of the Ludds came piling through. They met the first line of Modders and started laying about them with stakes and clubs. They were a ravening horde buoyed up by their righteous anger. These weren't the placard waving protestors hoping to cause a change. These were the arm and the boot of people who felt so threatened they had to lay about the source of the threat with fist and club.
I should have announced I was a police officer. I should have tried to calm the situation down. But they wouldn't have taken me seriously. They would have wrapped a club around my tattooed face.
I moved into the aisle and intercepted the Ludd leading the charge. He ignored my outstretched arm, his face a mask of unleashed fury and I knew he would pound me into the ground given the chance, my facial tattoos marking me as 'alien', as 'that which is to be destroyed'. I ducked under his initial blow and swung back into his solar plexus knocking him cold.
A white light exploded on the left side of my face and I fell heavily. As I rose again I saw Delyth had taken the club that had hit me and was striking back with white-hot anger.
After that it got really bad.
I can remember punching a Ludd and him collapsing into the knave, whacking his head on the wooden pew. I remember feeling a bond of companionship with the modders fighting along side me, a wave of feeling that makes me sick now to think of it. I lost the thing that makes policemen good: control. I was working more on animal instinct than human thought and right beside me, trading blows and punches, was Delyth. Her position as a tech obviously hadn't completely erased her training, as she drop-kicked another Ludd out of contention and into unconsciousness.
In the middle of the chaos Xerces was laying about him with a stave, his red eye gleaming as he spouted exhortations and encouragements to his flock in a most unpriestly like manner. Its the first time I've seen the clergy urging on violence but for him the Ludds represented all the hate and intolerance of their kind. He was paying it back in spades.
A shout went up and Xerces turned just as a thrown half-brick came arching through the air and caught him clean on the metal side of his face.
There was a resounding bang as the metallic mask flew off, exposing what should have been the hideous scarring and augmental electronics it was meant to hide. Except, there were no scars. There were no electronics. The mask hid nothing except perfect skin and another pale blue eye to match its twin.
Xerces had no damage at all. He was a first stage human, as he had been the day he was born.
He spluttered as the room fell silent all gazing at their leader, the man who told them all the wonders of changing. Of altering their bodies to be closer to his. Closer to the divine.
"It's a miracle!" Xerces shouted in his now very human, very nervous voice "I've been cured...." He hadn't even finished the sentence before the first Modder fist impacted on him. In an instant all the freaks and weirdoes turned on him. The ones he'd encouraged. The ones he'd lied to. They thought he'd been leading by example, but they been duped and they were in the mood for revenge.
I used the confusion to make a move to the back door, dragging Delyth behind me. Amid the crowd Xerces gave an all too human scream that was suddenly ended.
We made it past the swarming Ludds to the car, Remy was already gunning the engine and we squealed away from the scene. I looked behind us and saw the church erupt in flames, lighting the night in every direction. Whether it was set by the Ludds or the betrayed Modders I'll never know.
Remy was so shaken he started talking in his native tongue.
"Vous les branleurs qu'anglais sont fous, je jamais devriez avoir la maison gauche!"
"What?" said Delyth, still shaking from the adrenaline.
"He said we're all crazy and he should have stayed at home." I translated absent-mindedly, lost in my own thoughts.
"I'm inclined to agree with him."
We were silent as Remy drove us homeward, knowing we couldn't tell anyone what had happened in there. It had been an unauthorized operation and as it had all gone south it could become very awkward to explain. Especially as I still had Luddite blood on my knuckles.
Remy dropped us off at Delyths apartment and sped away into the night without a further word.
I walked Delyth up to her place, I wasn't sure quite why.
She unlocked her front door and turned to me.
"You don't have to go home you know," she said, her face betraying the tangled emotions beneath the surface.
"Jennifer will be waiting for me," I said simply, the neutral nature of the statement speaking more than words ever could.
"We could have died in there tonight," she said looking straight at me, seeing right through me, "I would never want to end my life thinking 'What if?'."
Before I could respond she turned and walked through her door, leaving it ajar. An invitation, a welcome, a temptation.
I followed her into to her apartment on autopilot, not really knowing what was going to happen next.
I can be really, really stupid sometimes.
Monday, 5 May 2008
Switch - Small Change
Small Change got rained on by his own 38.
His nickname, like everything else about him, was totally inappropriate. He must have weighed four hundred pounds and was fat in that way sports stars go when they've got nothing to force them into the gym every morning.
He was a Sumo wrestler, won a few minor contests but he had little in the way of discipline, no composure and would let his temper get the better of him. Clever opponents would just taunt him into making a mistake.
Just after the biggest win of his burgeoning career he was found in a compromising position with the Dojo owner's daughter. If he'd been a star wrestler it could have been overlooked. Small Change, however was kicked to the curb with a size sixty waistline and few transferable talents.
Beating people up for money is always a skill set needed by a subsection of society and he had both training and experience in this specialised field.
He worked as muscle for a few small time Loan sharks for a while, learning the game before that small brain, insulated by several hundred pounds of blubber, clicked onto a new concept. He bounced Jimmy the Fish out of business, literally, and took up Jimmy's old patch and markers.
That first week Small-Change was in charge, ten of Jimmy's long-time non-payees ended up in A & E. They were the lucky ones who found a way to get the money. Unlike the two poor saps who took a ride to the cold metal slab downstairs.
That was the first time I had the pleasure of meeting him. Vice have got the sharking side of things but as soon as pulses slow to a dead stop that's when my boys get called in.
From the coroners report it wasn't hard to work out what had happened.
Having all your ribs crushed and your organs turned to pate can happen if you have a horrific Auto accident, or if a pissed off ex-sumo who you owe money to uses your chest as a trampoline.
Of course we couldn't prove anything, nobody wanted to talk and the word on the street was after that first week of carnage, everybody paid on time. No-one wanted to owe him money for too long. That's where his nickname came from, the whispers were he'd kill you even if you only owed him a few pennies.
Still if you were in a jam, needed some dough up front, no questions asked, he was your man. Every day, in the same reinforced seat, in the same bar, drinking the same cheap whiskey and laughing through his broken yellow teeth.
He was still smiling when we arrived on the scene, black eightball eyes showing the death blood of fatal head trauma. He was spread-eagled on the cheap lino of the barroom floor with six bullet holes. Two in the head and the other four in the enormous gut that flopped around his torso like a half deflated beach ball.
There was just something inherently wrong about his mouth of broken dentistry still smiling after death. Like having a Sick Animal Hospital next to a Vietnamese restaurant.
The gun, his gun, was found a block away. Wiped clean of course, and nobody was surprised when the ballistics matched the six slugs they pulled out of him to the pistols six chambers.
No witnesses, no suspects, no clues. Everyone wanted him dead for some reason and there was no pressure on us to pursue it.
All that was left of him after the coroner had removed the carcass was a gaudy Hawaiian shirt the size of a ships mainsail, covered with blood and whisky.
FIN (With thanks to Tom Waits for the title.)
Monday, 12 November 2007
Switch 1.5 atmosphere
There's a place deep on the west side, past the gaudy display and tourist traps of the 'old city', where the real old city still dwells. Tourists always go there to experience life as it was during war years. They needn't have bothered. Just find an open sewer and jump in. That's the atmosphere of the real west side. Then shoot yourself in the head for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That's the real skinny, none of this 'Plutonium spirit ' with grubby faced urchins sharing Geiger counters and breathing filters as they skip their way to the school they set up underground.
In a lot of ways things haven't moved on for a lot of people since those times. The slums are still there, silently broadcasting back all the radiation they absorbed into the next generation of grubby faced urchins, or 'bastards' as I like to call them.
The slums are where most of vices jobs are, occasionally they'll call my boys in. Some john gets whacked and we're expected to do the hard stuff, like try and explain to his wife and kids what he was doing in that part of town. And that time of night. Without his pants.
One of the most depressing jobs in the world must be that of the youth justice officer. He sees the same kids week in-out getting in trouble from breaking and entering and getting pissed on synth cider at eleven in the morning. And he knows. He knows no matter what he does the same kids will be there the next week all the way up to the time they're not his to deal with anymore and they get sent away to the real jail. Where they learn all the rest of the skills they need for their continuing life of crime. It may be tough at the top but its tough enough to make diamonds at the bottom.
So stop me if you've heard this one before.
Man goes into a bar. He has a drink. He has another one, He asks the bartender where he could find some company. The bartender points out a clearly underage girl sitting at a booth on her own. The man, shocked walks away and calls the police.
Oh, you haven't heard that one before? Thats because it never fucking happens. The man doesn't call the police. He doesn't walk away. He's not even shocked anymore. He goes over and asks her how much. No pre-amble. No small talk. Straight to business there's no love in this.
So she nods her head to the bathrooms. They walk over and finish their transaction.
Except when he walks into the bathroom its not the sexual release he's getting. It's me. With a pair of cuffs and anger in my eyes. Which I know might turn some of you on. But not this guy.
All he wanted was a way to relax in a strange city and instead he's looking at 5-10 years and a record as a sex offender.
This might count as a victory on the crime statistics but honestly who won? We didn't.
The juvie hooker we're using as bait? I know for a fact as soon as this stings over she'll find another bar and this for real there. There's too much money to be made from fat horny suits for her not to.
If its a choice between dignity and eating well, if you've ever been there you'll know its no choice at all.
These guys pay for 5 minutes or an hour of intimacy and what they get is cold hard sex. All sharp corners and no emotion just lust. Or if hes really unlucky one of those antibiotic resistant venereal diseases. That's something to try and explain to your wife isn't it?
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
SWITCH EPISODE 1
Prologue:
I don't sleep well anymore.
I was never what you might call a natural sleeper. A pack of Morley reds a day and an entire lake of coffee to myself meant I'd grab maybe a few hours a night. I'd rise in the morning and walk for hours around the dimly lit streets in that magic time when its too early for the normals and too late for the weirdo's.
The city is alone then. Its mine.
With no-one else around it shows itself to me, shares with me its secrets. The moments of tenderness in a place of unfeeling concrete and steel. The roses in the dirt.
When Jennifer came, my diet improved but my somnambulism was the one thing she simply couldn't change. Without the Stimulants my body had grown to rely on I became tired but simply couldn't cross over into anything approaching restful sleep.
I would lie awake for hours watching her breathe quietly next to me, marvelling at how easy she made it look. Even facing away from me I could tell she had that expression of quiet serenity on her face which made her look like she hadn't a care to call her own.
She never had nightmares and for this I envied her more than anything else. My own dreams though brief were always fraught with terror and a creeping unfaceable inescapable dread.
They would always start the same, I'd be washing the floor or chopping some vegetables or something similarly innocuous in my Mothers house where I'd lived there for most of my life until I got that cheap shithole flat on the east side. As I was going about my task I'd get the rising fear that something was wrong, something was happening as I was wasting my time on some mundane task. The fear rises into panic and into terror but I can't stop. I can't stop chopping or peeling or scrubbing or washing or whatever. I know I need to get upstairs to get to whatever's happening but my body just keeps on doing its boring task as my brain screams in its prison of flesh and bone.
Its just then I feel a dark presence behind me and rise screaming through to consciousness.
This time though it was the phone that woke me whilst I was halfway through scrubbing the brown rings on the bath.
Blinking my way into consciousness I felt for the reassuring weight of the receiver and Emitted a half question half cry into the black handle.
"Whharug!?"
The calm female voice on the other end, clearly used to dealing with waking people up at ungodly hours, patiently explained the relevant details, prompting only a few single word queries from me.
"Okay, I'll be there in twenty," I said swinging my legs over the side of the bed and plonking the receiver down onto its antique plastic housing.
"I've got to go," I said to the warm, curved form still sprawled under the duvet.
"Why can't you work a nine to five, like normal people?"
"Honey, nine to fives died out in the twentieth century," I replied.
"Says the man with a Bakelite phone," she said sifting in the bed slightly signalling the end of the conversation.
As I pulled on my coat and stepped out into the freezing air I realised what I didn't say was nine to fives never had existed, for cops.
Chapter 1:
The air was thick with the smell of
musk and cheap liquor, the downtown
perfume of faded dreams and shabby
fantasies. It was still raining with
a persistence and vigour that implied
God was trying to wash all the shit
off the streets and then drown the
streets themselves, start over again,
Noah style.
The cab dropped me off at the
junction of Wapner and fifth and I
walked the half a block until I saw
the tell tale yellow tape cornering
off a small alley set like a wrinkle
in smooth sandstone of the block.
I don't like arriving at a crime
scene in a cab, it sets the wrong
impression. Besides, my appointment
wasn't going anywhere.
"Over here boss!" Remy called out to
me from under a nearby shop awning
where he was sheltering from God's
streaming hate. A Frenchman by birth
he had adopted this country of
mongrels and chancers with oddly
enough, a European's passion.
In fact most people thought the dark,
scruffy officer with the air of
aloofness was the Frenchman not his
rotund beaming sidekick.
Unfortunately it was the other way
around although only one person has
ever had the balls to call me scruffy
to my face.
I waved to Remy and walked over to
the white sheet that was the blanket
for the concrete bed Jane Doe lay on.
This was the thirteenth Jane Doe for
me which is actually a low number
compared to the number of known
victims I've crouched beside.
I could hear Remy calling for me but
I wanted to take a quick look at the
victim before allowing myself to dry
out under the awning. I whisked the
soaked sheet back and gasped.
Homicide, Matricide, death by hammer,
death by carving knife and even in
one noticeable instance, death by
Satsuma, I flatter myself that I've
seen it all, but this? This I was
unprepared for.
A pair of sharp green eyes stared up
and through me in the rictus of
death. The eyes however were fairly
remarkable being both horizontal and
green. The whiskers didn't help
matters either. In fact if I'm being
honest the orange and black fur
covering every inch of her was pretty
surprising as well.
Remy came puffing up behind me.
"I tried to warn you. It kind of
takes you by surprise doesn't it?"
Stunned I nodded, my hand reaching
for a pack of cigarettes that hadn't
been there for two years now. In
times of stress my hands tend to act
of their own volition and they always
reach for the smokes they know they
shouldn't have.
She was clearly a gene-mixer. The
technology was decades old but still
illegal in every country that cared
about such things. She was clearly
born a human but at some point in her
past had had feline traits and
characteristics spliced into her
boring human DNA.
The mistake most people make about
genetics is that for every one
characteristic there’s one gene.
"Ooh there's the gene for big breasts
and look here's the gene for a big
bum, let's take that one out. Add the
blond hair and blue eyes genes and
that's your Aryan!"
In reality nearly every physical
characteristic has tens or even
hundreds of different genes which can
influence or block other genes
leading to a physical characteristic
which is clearly a mix of different
sources. Like an orchestra is made up
of tens of people all working
together to create a beautiful sound.
Its this blend of genes that creates
our unique makeup and proves a
nightmare for anyone trying to tinker
with it. Taking away a single gene
that seemingly has no function at all
can cause the whole pack of cards to
come crashing down. Understand when I
say a pack of cards I actually mean a
living human being whose un-tampered
genes are doing just fine thank you
very much, you can see the potential
for disaster is huge.
Jane Doe however was a work of art.
She had clearly been beautiful before
the switch and was lean in the way
track athletes were. Her coat was
plush and even strong shoulders
tapering down to delicate hands that
clearly had no paw in them at all.
"This kind of work's expensive." I
said out loud.
"Yeah," Agreed Remy," Not your usual
Thai botch job."
There were people for whom the thrill
of being, or being with, a part human
part animal was worth the risk of
permanently stunted genome. Some
traits would go in and come out like
Lego blocks. And some would stick
around and linger forever. Thailand
has always been a draw for
s*xtourists looking for a different
kind of hit.
For those born in the kind of poverty
we only ever see on telethons,
becoming part animal to milk money
from fat western perverts is a no
brainer. Unfortunately because of the
black market nature of the operation
even the pimps that put the money up
front for the procedure can't be
sure how well it'll go. The back
streets of Phuket are full of botched
jobs. Girls and boys whose beauty you
can almost still read through the
folds of mutated flesh and useless
extra limbs.
As ever, there’s still a market for
even these poor crippled beings but
its not the same as the animal
festishissation and worship that
happens in the slightly better lit
quarters of Thailand.
I looked down at the mangled body
with a mangled genome and wondered
how much of Jane had been human
before someone switched the lights
off.
I replaced the sheet. The rain was
keeping the vultures away although
one or two ghouls were being kept
back by the power of the yellow tape.
I knew where I had to go but If I was
heading into the darkness I'd need
more backup than My French companion
could provide.
"Stay here and wait for the coroner"
I said to Remy,
"Okay, Where are you off to?" he
replied.
"I've got to go and see a man about a
dog."
Chapter 2:
Smoke hung lazily around like a bad debt obscuring even further the dark recesses of the room. Half formed shapes and figures moved slowly in the murk. Here and there you could see a hand or an arm in one of the amber pools of light from the recessed bulbs. Bodies moved slowly around touching, grasping, pulling or stroking. Slow trance-like music burbled, its rhythmic pulsing adding to the dreamlike quality. Time seemed to lose its meaning. Seconds, hours, minutes all intermingled and became lost inside the space of the darkened room.
That is until I kicked the door through its hinges.
I'd known about this club for months now. Its location was changed regularly to keep people like me off the scent, we'd turn up days or even weeks too late, finding freshly painted walls and the sharp tang of bleach on every surface.
But this time we'd caught them at it, the gene switched body in the alley was all the leverage I needed to get some unorthodox methods sanctioned.
I'd pulled in the usual snitches and gave them the old once over. Most of them had seen it a hundred times before but on this occasion there was a small difference. The K-9 section had loaned us one of their finest four footed and we brought him in at the end of the usual merry-go-round.
Now most of the grebs and low lives didn't react. Why should you? Its just a dog. However when Low-k (really named Kevin Lomax) jumped out of his chair and cowered on the table screaming I knew we had something.
See dogs aren't clever. They just aren't. But they do have an amazing nose and a sense of smell better than anything we could ever conceive. Part of that sense is knowing when something smells wrong or altered or switched.
They can smell gene-switchers even after they've been switched back, don't ask me how. All I can tell you is that the person may look totally kosher to you and me but the dog can tell. And they really don't like it. It looks like a human but smells like a cat/shark/ring tailed lemur and the dog won't stop barking.
When we'd pulled the dog back off Low K but not too far, he told me everything I wanted to know and a few things I didn't. He spilled everything over his confession of a splice earlier in his life which he'd had changed back and his compulsion to visit this club. He'd go and enjoy other peoples changed genomes rather than the pain and expense of getting himself switched again.
I took the address to Vice and within hours we had a squad ready to bust down the door I'd just kicked through.
From either side of me streamed the uniformed officers grabbing the nearest body and cuffing them in a parody of the intimate scenes that had been happening just seconds before.
I strode past the flailing switchers and the humans that love them, through to the back where I knew my target would be.
I needed the help of the battering ram to get through the metal plated office door and there sat Simon Guanto beaming his big tusky smile at me.
"Inspector. So nice to see you. Won't you come in?"
Chapter 3:
The interview room was exactly as you'd expect. A windowless cupboard with cork board muffling the walls and unsettling stains on the floor. There was a camera mounted high on the wall. It was used for keeping cops honest or recording blood-soaked confessions depending on the suspect. I didn't know which way this one would go.
Guanto's presence was overpowering. Even though he was sitting peacefully in the middle of the interview room his aura seemed to fill the space to almost bursting. Thick set features, a turned up nose and little piggy eyes weren't helped by the prominent tusks that stuck up on either side of his jaw.
His confidence was almost as powerful as his odour, which burst through the pungent aftershave to assault the nostrils of anyone unfortunate enough to be sat close to him.
Like me.
"I want to talk about the girl."
He laughed and spread his stumpy arms, "Which girl? There were rather a few of them I seems to remember."
"Not at the party. We'll come to that later."
"Have you got a name for this particular girl? So I can tell you exactly where I was when she claims I was elsewhere?"
I leaned in.
"She isn't claiming anything. Take a look."
I dropped the stack of photos in front of him. He picked them up and started flicking through them.
"Don't know her." he snorted.
And that told me everything.
You see people have patterns in the way they speak and act. Under normal circumstances they'll just maintain their normal pattern. Five second with this guy would tell you he'd crack jokes through his mothers funeral. That's the way he is. He didn't take this seriously or he would have insisted on being lawyer'd up from the start. His casual attitude towards me and the law came from his secure knowledge that even though we'd caught him red trottered hosting an orgy, there wasn't much we could do. A slap on the wrist a big fine and next month he's in somebody else's city doing exactly the same thing.
But after his first look at the Jane Tiger photos he'd shut up tighter than a spinsters wallet. His tongue licked nervously across his twin tusks. He'd come in here on a procurment charge at best and now he was looking straight down the barrel of homicide. And I was about to rack the slide.
I reached into the cardboard folder by my side and slapped three pieces of paper upside down. I turned them over one by one letting him see my poker hand.
"Item one."
Slap.
"A one off payment from your account to an unidentified business in Thailand."
He shifted in the metal confines of his chair.
"Item two."
Slap.
"Two plane tickets for you and the alley girl before her change into Cheetara. But here's the rub, you flew back alone a week later with a large crate in the hold of the plane labelled LIVE ANIMAL."
"Now wait just a minute..." he started.
"Item three."
Slap,
"A substantial deposit of cash into your account two days after your trip."
He flustered, I didn't give him a chance to talk.
"So I'm thinking you pick up a stray girl on spec, give her the Thailand switch, let some bastard have his way with her and when he gets a little rough..."
"Hang on..."
"Maybe she gets too rough and he has to bite back? You put the squeeze on the poor sap blackmail him for your money back and dumping the body on the way to the bank. How are you liking this now?"
"STOP!"
I sat back impressed at the purple colour he'd achieved. The stink in the room contained more than just his musk now. That was raw fear mixed on in there.
I'd got enough to watch him be turned into bacon in any state with the right laws.
And then he totally turned the tables on me dropping a name I'd never heard mentioned in this stinking precinct.
"She wasn't for anyone, I sold her to Alexi Van Sant!"
Chapter 4:
I started out of the interview room like the hounds of hell were after me which they soon would be.
"Remy!" I yelled across the squad room. He came bumbling towards me his normally smiling face gaping and drawn. I knew he'd heard the blasphemy from Guanto from the interview room camera.
"Do you think its true, boss? Did he sell her to Van Sant?" He asked, searching my face for answers I didn't have.
"I don't know. It'll never stand up in court though."
I scratched my cheek trying to get a plan together. It didn't have to be a great plan or even a good one, just a plan that got me moving.
"Right," I said eventually "Get in there, take Porky's statement get it notarized and do not leave his side."
"Gotcha. Where are you going?"
"I'm going to give Van Sant a chance to talk before his lawyers gag him up like a gimp."
Remy nodded once and walked over to the interview room. Once again I blessed the Gods that gave me a partner who knew when to talk and when to shut up and get on with it.
I drove over to Van Sant's place in a unmarked squad car. No need to put the wind up him just yet. The twin towers baring his name rose, black and threatening in the distance. Looming over the road their unique architecture gave them the appearance of almost toppling over the drivers on the road below. All they'd need would be one good breath of air and they come crashing down around us.
Even then Van Sant would still be standing.
He was the last of The Twelve. The last remnant of humanities Golden age when science could conquer everything and our boundaries seemed limitless.
He was head of the research team at Everex Global when they made the discovery that made him and the other eleven world famous. Working with embryonic cells Everex had found a way of arresting the normal cell cycle.
Every cell in your body gets replaced many times in your life. The old cell reaches the end of its usefulness and dies. Think of it as a best before date, after that point the cell might go bad, form cancers do all sorts of nasty stuff.
Van Sant and his team found a way of stopping the cells from dying. A way of preserving the flesh as it was. Forever.
They'd inoculated all of the research team before the F.D.A. managed to bust down the door burn the lab to the ground and arrest them all.
The Courts tried them for crimes against humanity and in a bid to avoid the chair they all agreed to a memory wipe back to before they worked for Everex. What's a few years memeories and a long prison sentence when you're pretty much immortal?
Two of the twelve died in custody before they were all moved to a secure location. It seems the other inmates had their own ideas on what qualified as eternal life and what didn't.
Your cells may not die and so the body doesn't decay when you're alive but a slit throat or a shiv through your heart in the shower will sure kill you.
Fifty years later the ten all emerged together looking not a day older than when they were locked up.
One was killed in an auto wreck four days after his release. It seems fifty years of four walls and three squares hadn't prepared him for the nightmare that the freeways had become.
Some died through illness and disease but the rest survived for a couple of hundred years. And then of the remaining six, five committed suicide together. Nothing dramatic. Just gassed themselves using an old burner.
That leaves Van Sant. A man who hasn't left the top of the tower he built in the last hundred years. He's protected up there. Protected from knives, cars and disease. Protected from the things that got the other eleven.
But is he protected from the law? Is he protected from me?
Chapter 5:
The Secretary at the front desk was surprised when I produced my credentials and asked to see Mister Van Sant and was even more surprised when the monogrammed elevator doors pinged open signifying the acceptance of my request.
The express lift shot me skywards at an alarming rate. The smooth glass walls afforded an expansive view of the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. As we climbed higher and higher we rose almost through the cloud bank that was now only half smog thank to the efforts of the air scrubbers that were now mandatory on every building.
The golden metal doors eventually purred open and I stepped into a blinding white cube with no visible exits except for the one that had just clicked shut behind me. I stood still for a moment, disorientated before I felt the rush of gas filling the room.
"Hold still please," A disembodied voice breathed in my ear,"This chamber is just to make sure you don't bring any uninvited pathogens in with you."
After a breathless few seconds the light dimmed and the sections of wall in front and on either side of me rolled up into the ceiling leaving me standing in a plush apartment.
The entire top floor was obviously one huge room, with couches, bookshelves and tables placed seemingly placed at random. Every inch of wall and shelf space was occupied by a thousand photos, paintings and nick knacks. Here and there were antique weapons and musical instruments I was not familiar with, ancient photographs of smiling happy people, a hundred lifetimes worth of ephemera gathered in one place.
From behind one of the bookshelves the voice from the booth floated over to me, "I know what you're thinking."
I followed the voice behind the bookshelf to find a well built man with dark hair showing the first flecks of grey. His eyes were faded blue and were the only part of him that looked a few centuries old. He strode towards me and took my hand in his. His handshake was strong, but felt cold.
"You're thinking 'Where did all this stuff come from?'"
"Actually," I replied, "I was wondering how long it takes your house keeper to dust."
He laughed, "I do it myself. When you have so many memories Inspector its hard to keep them all in your head. There's only a finite amount of space in there. New thoughts keep forcing the old ones out." He swept his arms around him, "These are my memories. When I clean them all one by one, they keep fresh of all the experiences that I've had that I can no longer rely on my poor antique brain for."
I gazed around again, looking through his personal memories, here a photo of a lover, probably decades dead, there a wooden knife, a souvenir of a holiday taken before anyone on the planet was born. It was a creepy feeling, like looking uninvited through some ones private correspondence.
"Would you care for a drink?"
"No thank you."
We sat on a couch with a view of the downtown skyline. In the office I'd felt so sure about his guilt I'd rushed over here with no thought for how I was going to play this.
I was going to have to improvise.
"So what brings you to see me Inspector? I hardly think someone of your talents is part of a community outreach programme."
"No, I'm actually here about a murder."
"Really? A murder? How ghoulish. You don't think I had anything to do with it do you?
"Your name was brought up in an interview I was conducting. I just need to establish your recent movements."
"Who was it?"
"The witness or the victim?"
"Both."
"The victim was a poor girl who'd had her genes tinkered with, not quite as elegantly as yourself of course. She been spliced with a big cat. a tiger I think."
"Interesting and the witness?"
""A know procurer for people with interesting tastes."
"And you're taking the word of a known felon over mine?"
"Don't forget sir, that you too have a criminal record for altering your own biology. And you haven't actually told me where you've been.
"In that case I can tell you I haven't left the tower in weeks months in fact. Too many germs on the street for my battered immune system."
"What if I were to tell you a credible witness has you as the last person that saw this person alive?"
"I'm not falling for that tired line, you're jumping to conclusions..."
"We found a paper trail that lead this girl from grad school dropout through Thailand and into your hands. Two days later she's found in an alley. You bought her. You killed her. You dumped her body. What part of this is stretching things too far?"
"This is libellous..."
"Actually it would be slander but that's only if its not true."
He rose and in one movement pulled a polished kiri hunting knife from the wall and pointed it at my throat. I stayed exactly where I was, I could see the years of madness boiling away in his eyes.
"Give me your gun."
"I don't carry one."
"You don't carry a gun?"
"I don't normally think they're necessary."
"Even for defence?"
"Whenever I've seen a gun fired they seem pretty offensive."
I wasn't sure what he'd do. When you've seen generations of people die human life must become pretty much meaningless. I felt sure if he'd committed one murder another one wouldn't haunt him. I had to play this very smart.
"Of course the irony is it was your own DNA that caught you. In a sample under her fingernail. You do have a unique genetic fingerprint." I bluffed playing for time.
The three foot of steel didn't even quiver.
"Tell me your side of how it happened. Put it down and we can talk this thing through."
His eyes still locked with mine. I slowly put my hand over the top blunt edge of the knife and lowered it down.
He sat, defeated, a shadow of the imposing presence that had greeted me at the door.
"Do you know," he began "How lucky you are? How fortunate you've been? We are not built to live forever, we are designed to live like a match. Struck once we burn brightly before fading into the ashes of our dreams. We are not meant to dimly glow forever. The thing they never tell you about eternal life, the secret that is hidden is that Eternal life, is boring. Everything you do, everything you see, you've seen you've experienced before. There's nothing new nothing exciting nothing to discover."
He grew more impassioned.
"Do you know the weight of the things I've forgotten? Do you know the treasured memories that have been pushed out by the sheer weight of stuff? Even sex loses it joy after a while. So you start trying stuff that only interests you because it's different. I sunk so low I even got interested in Cricket for a while."
"Alison was something new and exciting but she wasn't right. I think she'd always wanted to become something more than she was born."
S"he went feral, inside every cat there's a lion dreaming of escape and in her there was a cat dreaming of a lion dreaming of escape. She attacked me, nearly killed me. I had to defend myself. That's what it was, self defence."
I'd had enough of his whining.
"Tell you what," I began "I could take you in. You could get the lawyers involved. claim mental anguish. You'll probably do twenty maybe thirty years. And be sat having this conversation in a hundred years with one of my successors about another poor dead girl. Or you could do what you know you should have done a long time ago but have never had the balls to go through with."
He looked up at me quizzically, tears blurring his eyes.
I walked over to the glass partition and opened the screen door leading to the balcony. The fresh air poured in for probably the first time in years.
I sighed theatrically "It appears I've left my handcuffs in the car. I'll have to go down and get them before I arrest you. Stay here."
I walked over to the lift and didn't look back.
I had gone about ten floors down in the lift before he overtook me. Unfavourable winds bounced him off the side of the building, as his body flopped and flailed, accelerating past the glass elevator towards the blurred ground below.
I don't care how vigorous your cells are, how resistant to decay or how immune to dying you've made them, when they're all spread out over a ten metre radius, you're screwed.
I walked past the squished remains of his centuries old body spreading its red load across the floor.
This was definitely someone else's mess, I'd dealt with enough dead bodies for one week.
I don't sleep well anymore.
I was never what you might call a natural sleeper. A pack of Morley reds a day and an entire lake of coffee to myself meant I'd grab maybe a few hours a night. I'd rise in the morning and walk for hours around the dimly lit streets in that magic time when its too early for the normals and too late for the weirdo's.
The city is alone then. Its mine.
With no-one else around it shows itself to me, shares with me its secrets. The moments of tenderness in a place of unfeeling concrete and steel. The roses in the dirt.
When Jennifer came, my diet improved but my somnambulism was the one thing she simply couldn't change. Without the Stimulants my body had grown to rely on I became tired but simply couldn't cross over into anything approaching restful sleep.
I would lie awake for hours watching her breathe quietly next to me, marvelling at how easy she made it look. Even facing away from me I could tell she had that expression of quiet serenity on her face which made her look like she hadn't a care to call her own.
She never had nightmares and for this I envied her more than anything else. My own dreams though brief were always fraught with terror and a creeping unfaceable inescapable dread.
They would always start the same, I'd be washing the floor or chopping some vegetables or something similarly innocuous in my Mothers house where I'd lived there for most of my life until I got that cheap shithole flat on the east side. As I was going about my task I'd get the rising fear that something was wrong, something was happening as I was wasting my time on some mundane task. The fear rises into panic and into terror but I can't stop. I can't stop chopping or peeling or scrubbing or washing or whatever. I know I need to get upstairs to get to whatever's happening but my body just keeps on doing its boring task as my brain screams in its prison of flesh and bone.
Its just then I feel a dark presence behind me and rise screaming through to consciousness.
This time though it was the phone that woke me whilst I was halfway through scrubbing the brown rings on the bath.
Blinking my way into consciousness I felt for the reassuring weight of the receiver and Emitted a half question half cry into the black handle.
"Whharug!?"
The calm female voice on the other end, clearly used to dealing with waking people up at ungodly hours, patiently explained the relevant details, prompting only a few single word queries from me.
"Okay, I'll be there in twenty," I said swinging my legs over the side of the bed and plonking the receiver down onto its antique plastic housing.
"I've got to go," I said to the warm, curved form still sprawled under the duvet.
"Why can't you work a nine to five, like normal people?"
"Honey, nine to fives died out in the twentieth century," I replied.
"Says the man with a Bakelite phone," she said sifting in the bed slightly signalling the end of the conversation.
As I pulled on my coat and stepped out into the freezing air I realised what I didn't say was nine to fives never had existed, for cops.
Chapter 1:
The air was thick with the smell of
musk and cheap liquor, the downtown
perfume of faded dreams and shabby
fantasies. It was still raining with
a persistence and vigour that implied
God was trying to wash all the shit
off the streets and then drown the
streets themselves, start over again,
Noah style.
The cab dropped me off at the
junction of Wapner and fifth and I
walked the half a block until I saw
the tell tale yellow tape cornering
off a small alley set like a wrinkle
in smooth sandstone of the block.
I don't like arriving at a crime
scene in a cab, it sets the wrong
impression. Besides, my appointment
wasn't going anywhere.
"Over here boss!" Remy called out to
me from under a nearby shop awning
where he was sheltering from God's
streaming hate. A Frenchman by birth
he had adopted this country of
mongrels and chancers with oddly
enough, a European's passion.
In fact most people thought the dark,
scruffy officer with the air of
aloofness was the Frenchman not his
rotund beaming sidekick.
Unfortunately it was the other way
around although only one person has
ever had the balls to call me scruffy
to my face.
I waved to Remy and walked over to
the white sheet that was the blanket
for the concrete bed Jane Doe lay on.
This was the thirteenth Jane Doe for
me which is actually a low number
compared to the number of known
victims I've crouched beside.
I could hear Remy calling for me but
I wanted to take a quick look at the
victim before allowing myself to dry
out under the awning. I whisked the
soaked sheet back and gasped.
Homicide, Matricide, death by hammer,
death by carving knife and even in
one noticeable instance, death by
Satsuma, I flatter myself that I've
seen it all, but this? This I was
unprepared for.
A pair of sharp green eyes stared up
and through me in the rictus of
death. The eyes however were fairly
remarkable being both horizontal and
green. The whiskers didn't help
matters either. In fact if I'm being
honest the orange and black fur
covering every inch of her was pretty
surprising as well.
Remy came puffing up behind me.
"I tried to warn you. It kind of
takes you by surprise doesn't it?"
Stunned I nodded, my hand reaching
for a pack of cigarettes that hadn't
been there for two years now. In
times of stress my hands tend to act
of their own volition and they always
reach for the smokes they know they
shouldn't have.
She was clearly a gene-mixer. The
technology was decades old but still
illegal in every country that cared
about such things. She was clearly
born a human but at some point in her
past had had feline traits and
characteristics spliced into her
boring human DNA.
The mistake most people make about
genetics is that for every one
characteristic there’s one gene.
"Ooh there's the gene for big breasts
and look here's the gene for a big
bum, let's take that one out. Add the
blond hair and blue eyes genes and
that's your Aryan!"
In reality nearly every physical
characteristic has tens or even
hundreds of different genes which can
influence or block other genes
leading to a physical characteristic
which is clearly a mix of different
sources. Like an orchestra is made up
of tens of people all working
together to create a beautiful sound.
Its this blend of genes that creates
our unique makeup and proves a
nightmare for anyone trying to tinker
with it. Taking away a single gene
that seemingly has no function at all
can cause the whole pack of cards to
come crashing down. Understand when I
say a pack of cards I actually mean a
living human being whose un-tampered
genes are doing just fine thank you
very much, you can see the potential
for disaster is huge.
Jane Doe however was a work of art.
She had clearly been beautiful before
the switch and was lean in the way
track athletes were. Her coat was
plush and even strong shoulders
tapering down to delicate hands that
clearly had no paw in them at all.
"This kind of work's expensive." I
said out loud.
"Yeah," Agreed Remy," Not your usual
Thai botch job."
There were people for whom the thrill
of being, or being with, a part human
part animal was worth the risk of
permanently stunted genome. Some
traits would go in and come out like
Lego blocks. And some would stick
around and linger forever. Thailand
has always been a draw for
s*xtourists looking for a different
kind of hit.
For those born in the kind of poverty
we only ever see on telethons,
becoming part animal to milk money
from fat western perverts is a no
brainer. Unfortunately because of the
black market nature of the operation
even the pimps that put the money up
front for the procedure can't be
sure how well it'll go. The back
streets of Phuket are full of botched
jobs. Girls and boys whose beauty you
can almost still read through the
folds of mutated flesh and useless
extra limbs.
As ever, there’s still a market for
even these poor crippled beings but
its not the same as the animal
festishissation and worship that
happens in the slightly better lit
quarters of Thailand.
I looked down at the mangled body
with a mangled genome and wondered
how much of Jane had been human
before someone switched the lights
off.
I replaced the sheet. The rain was
keeping the vultures away although
one or two ghouls were being kept
back by the power of the yellow tape.
I knew where I had to go but If I was
heading into the darkness I'd need
more backup than My French companion
could provide.
"Stay here and wait for the coroner"
I said to Remy,
"Okay, Where are you off to?" he
replied.
"I've got to go and see a man about a
dog."
Chapter 2:
Smoke hung lazily around like a bad debt obscuring even further the dark recesses of the room. Half formed shapes and figures moved slowly in the murk. Here and there you could see a hand or an arm in one of the amber pools of light from the recessed bulbs. Bodies moved slowly around touching, grasping, pulling or stroking. Slow trance-like music burbled, its rhythmic pulsing adding to the dreamlike quality. Time seemed to lose its meaning. Seconds, hours, minutes all intermingled and became lost inside the space of the darkened room.
That is until I kicked the door through its hinges.
I'd known about this club for months now. Its location was changed regularly to keep people like me off the scent, we'd turn up days or even weeks too late, finding freshly painted walls and the sharp tang of bleach on every surface.
But this time we'd caught them at it, the gene switched body in the alley was all the leverage I needed to get some unorthodox methods sanctioned.
I'd pulled in the usual snitches and gave them the old once over. Most of them had seen it a hundred times before but on this occasion there was a small difference. The K-9 section had loaned us one of their finest four footed and we brought him in at the end of the usual merry-go-round.
Now most of the grebs and low lives didn't react. Why should you? Its just a dog. However when Low-k (really named Kevin Lomax) jumped out of his chair and cowered on the table screaming I knew we had something.
See dogs aren't clever. They just aren't. But they do have an amazing nose and a sense of smell better than anything we could ever conceive. Part of that sense is knowing when something smells wrong or altered or switched.
They can smell gene-switchers even after they've been switched back, don't ask me how. All I can tell you is that the person may look totally kosher to you and me but the dog can tell. And they really don't like it. It looks like a human but smells like a cat/shark/ring tailed lemur and the dog won't stop barking.
When we'd pulled the dog back off Low K but not too far, he told me everything I wanted to know and a few things I didn't. He spilled everything over his confession of a splice earlier in his life which he'd had changed back and his compulsion to visit this club. He'd go and enjoy other peoples changed genomes rather than the pain and expense of getting himself switched again.
I took the address to Vice and within hours we had a squad ready to bust down the door I'd just kicked through.
From either side of me streamed the uniformed officers grabbing the nearest body and cuffing them in a parody of the intimate scenes that had been happening just seconds before.
I strode past the flailing switchers and the humans that love them, through to the back where I knew my target would be.
I needed the help of the battering ram to get through the metal plated office door and there sat Simon Guanto beaming his big tusky smile at me.
"Inspector. So nice to see you. Won't you come in?"
Chapter 3:
The interview room was exactly as you'd expect. A windowless cupboard with cork board muffling the walls and unsettling stains on the floor. There was a camera mounted high on the wall. It was used for keeping cops honest or recording blood-soaked confessions depending on the suspect. I didn't know which way this one would go.
Guanto's presence was overpowering. Even though he was sitting peacefully in the middle of the interview room his aura seemed to fill the space to almost bursting. Thick set features, a turned up nose and little piggy eyes weren't helped by the prominent tusks that stuck up on either side of his jaw.
His confidence was almost as powerful as his odour, which burst through the pungent aftershave to assault the nostrils of anyone unfortunate enough to be sat close to him.
Like me.
"I want to talk about the girl."
He laughed and spread his stumpy arms, "Which girl? There were rather a few of them I seems to remember."
"Not at the party. We'll come to that later."
"Have you got a name for this particular girl? So I can tell you exactly where I was when she claims I was elsewhere?"
I leaned in.
"She isn't claiming anything. Take a look."
I dropped the stack of photos in front of him. He picked them up and started flicking through them.
"Don't know her." he snorted.
And that told me everything.
You see people have patterns in the way they speak and act. Under normal circumstances they'll just maintain their normal pattern. Five second with this guy would tell you he'd crack jokes through his mothers funeral. That's the way he is. He didn't take this seriously or he would have insisted on being lawyer'd up from the start. His casual attitude towards me and the law came from his secure knowledge that even though we'd caught him red trottered hosting an orgy, there wasn't much we could do. A slap on the wrist a big fine and next month he's in somebody else's city doing exactly the same thing.
But after his first look at the Jane Tiger photos he'd shut up tighter than a spinsters wallet. His tongue licked nervously across his twin tusks. He'd come in here on a procurment charge at best and now he was looking straight down the barrel of homicide. And I was about to rack the slide.
I reached into the cardboard folder by my side and slapped three pieces of paper upside down. I turned them over one by one letting him see my poker hand.
"Item one."
Slap.
"A one off payment from your account to an unidentified business in Thailand."
He shifted in the metal confines of his chair.
"Item two."
Slap.
"Two plane tickets for you and the alley girl before her change into Cheetara. But here's the rub, you flew back alone a week later with a large crate in the hold of the plane labelled LIVE ANIMAL."
"Now wait just a minute..." he started.
"Item three."
Slap,
"A substantial deposit of cash into your account two days after your trip."
He flustered, I didn't give him a chance to talk.
"So I'm thinking you pick up a stray girl on spec, give her the Thailand switch, let some bastard have his way with her and when he gets a little rough..."
"Hang on..."
"Maybe she gets too rough and he has to bite back? You put the squeeze on the poor sap blackmail him for your money back and dumping the body on the way to the bank. How are you liking this now?"
"STOP!"
I sat back impressed at the purple colour he'd achieved. The stink in the room contained more than just his musk now. That was raw fear mixed on in there.
I'd got enough to watch him be turned into bacon in any state with the right laws.
And then he totally turned the tables on me dropping a name I'd never heard mentioned in this stinking precinct.
"She wasn't for anyone, I sold her to Alexi Van Sant!"
Chapter 4:
I started out of the interview room like the hounds of hell were after me which they soon would be.
"Remy!" I yelled across the squad room. He came bumbling towards me his normally smiling face gaping and drawn. I knew he'd heard the blasphemy from Guanto from the interview room camera.
"Do you think its true, boss? Did he sell her to Van Sant?" He asked, searching my face for answers I didn't have.
"I don't know. It'll never stand up in court though."
I scratched my cheek trying to get a plan together. It didn't have to be a great plan or even a good one, just a plan that got me moving.
"Right," I said eventually "Get in there, take Porky's statement get it notarized and do not leave his side."
"Gotcha. Where are you going?"
"I'm going to give Van Sant a chance to talk before his lawyers gag him up like a gimp."
Remy nodded once and walked over to the interview room. Once again I blessed the Gods that gave me a partner who knew when to talk and when to shut up and get on with it.
I drove over to Van Sant's place in a unmarked squad car. No need to put the wind up him just yet. The twin towers baring his name rose, black and threatening in the distance. Looming over the road their unique architecture gave them the appearance of almost toppling over the drivers on the road below. All they'd need would be one good breath of air and they come crashing down around us.
Even then Van Sant would still be standing.
He was the last of The Twelve. The last remnant of humanities Golden age when science could conquer everything and our boundaries seemed limitless.
He was head of the research team at Everex Global when they made the discovery that made him and the other eleven world famous. Working with embryonic cells Everex had found a way of arresting the normal cell cycle.
Every cell in your body gets replaced many times in your life. The old cell reaches the end of its usefulness and dies. Think of it as a best before date, after that point the cell might go bad, form cancers do all sorts of nasty stuff.
Van Sant and his team found a way of stopping the cells from dying. A way of preserving the flesh as it was. Forever.
They'd inoculated all of the research team before the F.D.A. managed to bust down the door burn the lab to the ground and arrest them all.
The Courts tried them for crimes against humanity and in a bid to avoid the chair they all agreed to a memory wipe back to before they worked for Everex. What's a few years memeories and a long prison sentence when you're pretty much immortal?
Two of the twelve died in custody before they were all moved to a secure location. It seems the other inmates had their own ideas on what qualified as eternal life and what didn't.
Your cells may not die and so the body doesn't decay when you're alive but a slit throat or a shiv through your heart in the shower will sure kill you.
Fifty years later the ten all emerged together looking not a day older than when they were locked up.
One was killed in an auto wreck four days after his release. It seems fifty years of four walls and three squares hadn't prepared him for the nightmare that the freeways had become.
Some died through illness and disease but the rest survived for a couple of hundred years. And then of the remaining six, five committed suicide together. Nothing dramatic. Just gassed themselves using an old burner.
That leaves Van Sant. A man who hasn't left the top of the tower he built in the last hundred years. He's protected up there. Protected from knives, cars and disease. Protected from the things that got the other eleven.
But is he protected from the law? Is he protected from me?
Chapter 5:
The Secretary at the front desk was surprised when I produced my credentials and asked to see Mister Van Sant and was even more surprised when the monogrammed elevator doors pinged open signifying the acceptance of my request.
The express lift shot me skywards at an alarming rate. The smooth glass walls afforded an expansive view of the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. As we climbed higher and higher we rose almost through the cloud bank that was now only half smog thank to the efforts of the air scrubbers that were now mandatory on every building.
The golden metal doors eventually purred open and I stepped into a blinding white cube with no visible exits except for the one that had just clicked shut behind me. I stood still for a moment, disorientated before I felt the rush of gas filling the room.
"Hold still please," A disembodied voice breathed in my ear,"This chamber is just to make sure you don't bring any uninvited pathogens in with you."
After a breathless few seconds the light dimmed and the sections of wall in front and on either side of me rolled up into the ceiling leaving me standing in a plush apartment.
The entire top floor was obviously one huge room, with couches, bookshelves and tables placed seemingly placed at random. Every inch of wall and shelf space was occupied by a thousand photos, paintings and nick knacks. Here and there were antique weapons and musical instruments I was not familiar with, ancient photographs of smiling happy people, a hundred lifetimes worth of ephemera gathered in one place.
From behind one of the bookshelves the voice from the booth floated over to me, "I know what you're thinking."
I followed the voice behind the bookshelf to find a well built man with dark hair showing the first flecks of grey. His eyes were faded blue and were the only part of him that looked a few centuries old. He strode towards me and took my hand in his. His handshake was strong, but felt cold.
"You're thinking 'Where did all this stuff come from?'"
"Actually," I replied, "I was wondering how long it takes your house keeper to dust."
He laughed, "I do it myself. When you have so many memories Inspector its hard to keep them all in your head. There's only a finite amount of space in there. New thoughts keep forcing the old ones out." He swept his arms around him, "These are my memories. When I clean them all one by one, they keep fresh of all the experiences that I've had that I can no longer rely on my poor antique brain for."
I gazed around again, looking through his personal memories, here a photo of a lover, probably decades dead, there a wooden knife, a souvenir of a holiday taken before anyone on the planet was born. It was a creepy feeling, like looking uninvited through some ones private correspondence.
"Would you care for a drink?"
"No thank you."
We sat on a couch with a view of the downtown skyline. In the office I'd felt so sure about his guilt I'd rushed over here with no thought for how I was going to play this.
I was going to have to improvise.
"So what brings you to see me Inspector? I hardly think someone of your talents is part of a community outreach programme."
"No, I'm actually here about a murder."
"Really? A murder? How ghoulish. You don't think I had anything to do with it do you?
"Your name was brought up in an interview I was conducting. I just need to establish your recent movements."
"Who was it?"
"The witness or the victim?"
"Both."
"The victim was a poor girl who'd had her genes tinkered with, not quite as elegantly as yourself of course. She been spliced with a big cat. a tiger I think."
"Interesting and the witness?"
""A know procurer for people with interesting tastes."
"And you're taking the word of a known felon over mine?"
"Don't forget sir, that you too have a criminal record for altering your own biology. And you haven't actually told me where you've been.
"In that case I can tell you I haven't left the tower in weeks months in fact. Too many germs on the street for my battered immune system."
"What if I were to tell you a credible witness has you as the last person that saw this person alive?"
"I'm not falling for that tired line, you're jumping to conclusions..."
"We found a paper trail that lead this girl from grad school dropout through Thailand and into your hands. Two days later she's found in an alley. You bought her. You killed her. You dumped her body. What part of this is stretching things too far?"
"This is libellous..."
"Actually it would be slander but that's only if its not true."
He rose and in one movement pulled a polished kiri hunting knife from the wall and pointed it at my throat. I stayed exactly where I was, I could see the years of madness boiling away in his eyes.
"Give me your gun."
"I don't carry one."
"You don't carry a gun?"
"I don't normally think they're necessary."
"Even for defence?"
"Whenever I've seen a gun fired they seem pretty offensive."
I wasn't sure what he'd do. When you've seen generations of people die human life must become pretty much meaningless. I felt sure if he'd committed one murder another one wouldn't haunt him. I had to play this very smart.
"Of course the irony is it was your own DNA that caught you. In a sample under her fingernail. You do have a unique genetic fingerprint." I bluffed playing for time.
The three foot of steel didn't even quiver.
"Tell me your side of how it happened. Put it down and we can talk this thing through."
His eyes still locked with mine. I slowly put my hand over the top blunt edge of the knife and lowered it down.
He sat, defeated, a shadow of the imposing presence that had greeted me at the door.
"Do you know," he began "How lucky you are? How fortunate you've been? We are not built to live forever, we are designed to live like a match. Struck once we burn brightly before fading into the ashes of our dreams. We are not meant to dimly glow forever. The thing they never tell you about eternal life, the secret that is hidden is that Eternal life, is boring. Everything you do, everything you see, you've seen you've experienced before. There's nothing new nothing exciting nothing to discover."
He grew more impassioned.
"Do you know the weight of the things I've forgotten? Do you know the treasured memories that have been pushed out by the sheer weight of stuff? Even sex loses it joy after a while. So you start trying stuff that only interests you because it's different. I sunk so low I even got interested in Cricket for a while."
"Alison was something new and exciting but she wasn't right. I think she'd always wanted to become something more than she was born."
S"he went feral, inside every cat there's a lion dreaming of escape and in her there was a cat dreaming of a lion dreaming of escape. She attacked me, nearly killed me. I had to defend myself. That's what it was, self defence."
I'd had enough of his whining.
"Tell you what," I began "I could take you in. You could get the lawyers involved. claim mental anguish. You'll probably do twenty maybe thirty years. And be sat having this conversation in a hundred years with one of my successors about another poor dead girl. Or you could do what you know you should have done a long time ago but have never had the balls to go through with."
He looked up at me quizzically, tears blurring his eyes.
I walked over to the glass partition and opened the screen door leading to the balcony. The fresh air poured in for probably the first time in years.
I sighed theatrically "It appears I've left my handcuffs in the car. I'll have to go down and get them before I arrest you. Stay here."
I walked over to the lift and didn't look back.
I had gone about ten floors down in the lift before he overtook me. Unfavourable winds bounced him off the side of the building, as his body flopped and flailed, accelerating past the glass elevator towards the blurred ground below.
I don't care how vigorous your cells are, how resistant to decay or how immune to dying you've made them, when they're all spread out over a ten metre radius, you're screwed.
I walked past the squished remains of his centuries old body spreading its red load across the floor.
This was definitely someone else's mess, I'd dealt with enough dead bodies for one week.
Friday, 17 August 2007
Stoned Jones, Jim Prophet, Clearly Evil and ...
I've finally found the fourth name to join the above triumvate. They're names i've collected over the last few years and i've been waiting for the fourth and final name, knowing that with it the story would come. Ladies and Gentlemen the final name is ... Terminal Bob.
Writing
I am rarely happy with what I write and its even rarer that I get a good feeling when I finish a piece. I've just completed a five part short story called Switch that I'll unleash on you slowly. And I am more than happy with it, in fact I am very very happy with it. Now I just have to fulfil a promise to an actor friend and turn it into a radio play.
Actually looking at it in its current state it would die on its arse on Radio as its mostly monologues, good monologues but monologues nonetheless.
Have to rejigg the whole thing. But that's part of the appeal. Watch this space.
UPDATE: A friend has just emailed asked if he can use one of the lines from part five as his Email signature. I can think of no higher honour.
Thursday, 9 August 2007
Notes from the road 12
Chapter 12
Sounds of laughter and music emanated out of the house like radio waves broadcasting into the night. The suburban street was lit only by the faintly yellow streetlights and their reflections from the still wet tarmac below them. Aside from the house of noise it was a quiet little suburb in a quiet little corner of a quiet little town in a medium-boring state. Nothing, good or bad, ever seemed to happen here and as in most places Youth (with a capital Y) had to make its own fun.
For Vicki, Lola and Rachel being 15 this mostly involved going around to each others houses, laughing at bad TV and discussing the pressing school issues of the day. Too cool for the geeks and no where near pretty enough to be popular, they surfed the high school wave of invisibility, safe in their anonymity.
It was a hot Friday night in June when the air seems to prickle with the promise of something greater just around the next corner. They were sitting in the front room with all the windows open and the TV blaring out the latest marketing campaign disguised as music video. This one involved a new-wave punk band, too young to have sex, playing on a beach surrounded by impossibly attractive women in silver-sliver bikinis.
"As if!" Scoffed Lola, self consciously bringing her knees up to her chest on the couch.
"Fake band playing a fake song on a fake beach surrounded by fake women with fake tits," Opined Vicki "The only thing that's real is my hatred and loathing for all of them."
"Get a load of you!" exclaimed Rachael doing an impression of Vicki's self righteous face "Its just a crappy song, don't get so tangled about it."
"I'm not getting tangled, I'm just bemoaning the state of 'pop' music today. It meant to be our generation right? Its meant to reflect our hopes and desires, not some fat bald sweaty chairman's thoughts on what the youth market wants."
Lola leaned forward on the couch to grab a handful of popcorn.
"So what do we want? What's representative of our doomed generation apart from teenage pregnancy, bad music and capitalism run amok?"
"Cynicism?"
"Ha Ha."
The beach song finished and the next video came on. It was your usual rap video crap about how nice to was to go to a club, sell drugs, shoot the guy you sold them to, smoke the drugs you've just stolen from his corpse and beat up a hooker on the way to another club. It was so bad it was beneath even the Invisibles contempt and so did not warrant comment.
The house was Vicki's mums here she'd lived ever since she was born. It wasn't large but with just the two of them there since her Dad left, it was comfortable and had enough space for a sleep over. Her mum was out with Tim again and probably wouldn't get back for another couple of hours when she'd come in and make them all cinnamon toast and hot chocolate with marshmallows before going to bed.
"So, " said Lola with a wicked glint in her eye "You want to get high?"
Rachael and Vicki stared at her.
"What?"
"Get high? You know? Puffing the L? Lighting up a sweet doobie? Smoking up the 'erb? Taking hits from the bong?
"Get high? You know? Puffing the L? Lighting up a sweet doobie? Smoking up the 'erb? Taking hits from the bong?
"Yes we understood what you meant we just couldn't believe you meant it Lo."
Lo smiled.
"Why not? Because I'm too sweet and innocent?"
"Only comparatively sweet and not at all innocent," Chimed in Rachael "You've known Vic far too long for that."
"Hey!" said Vic with a grin "That'd be quite offensive if it wasn't true."
"I couldn't believe you meant it because you only ever talk to us and we aren't selling." said Rachael moving closer to Lola on the couch "Who did you get it from?"
"Just this guy I know." Lola tried to look casual as if the TV still held her attention but inside she was thrumming, desperate to tell all.
Rachael and Vic shared a look, their interest piqued as they continued their questioning.
"This guy? You don't know any 'guys' ! Who is he?"
"Just a guy, in French class."
Vic jumped up and began in her best acting voice,
"Their eyes met across a declined verb. She could feel the weight of his pronouns as he began to speak..."
"Their eyes met across a declined verb. She could feel the weight of his pronouns as he began to speak..."
Rachael fell about laughing whilst Lola started to turn a further shade of red.
"Its not like that. He just sold me some weed, that's all there is to it."
"Its not like that. He just sold me some weed, that's all there is to it."
"What's his name?"
"Not telling."
"Well if you won't give up his name there must be more of a story!"
"There isn't. I barely know him, he just asked if I wanted some dope and I said yes. That's all there was too it."
Vic pulled up short in her gentle mocking
"Hang on, he asked?"
"Hang on, he asked?"
"What?"
"He asked if you wanted some weed?"
"Yeah. So?"
"Let me take a look at the bag"
Wordlessly Lola handed over a small plastic pouch filled to bursting with chopped herb. Vicki opened it and took a long smell like a wine connoisseur identifying a particularly obscure vintage. The other two looked on in breathless anticipation.
She opened her eyes and looked straight at her.
"Sorry Lola its the oldest trick in the book. What you've got here is a particularly fine blend of oregano."
Lola snatched the bag back from her spilling some of the now worthless contents on the floor.
"How would you know?" she snapped. "You're no expert!"
"Smoke it and get ill then, but I know dope and that is not it."
Lola looked gutted.
"I should really have known, one moment I don't exist the next second he's super friendly like he's selling me something special."
"Yeah, men can be a bit like that." Replied Rachael "At least you didn't fuck him for it."
All three started laughing.
"Look," Said Vicki " I can show you something but you've got to promise not to tell."
"Okay."
"I'm in"
They walked through into Vic's mums bedroom which was decorated in a very plain Mexican style with a poncho hung on one wall as a decoration and a lakeside scene on the other. The furniture was as Spartan as the room, except for the bed which took up most of the far wall.
Vic walked up to the huge bed and reached under it to pull out a large dark rosewood box. She placed it on the bed itself and the friends could all see the concentric circle pattern carved deep into the lid.
She looked at both her friends who were silent realising the magnitude of what they were about to see. With a little flourish Vick flung back the lid and began shuffling through the items contained within. There was her Mums wedding veil and long neglected rosary but she was looking for something on the other end of the moral scale.
"I know about weed," Said Vicki building up to a triumphal finish "Because," She held up her prize "My mum smokes it!".
She was brandishing a sandwich bag with a small amount of brown leaf clustered in one corner more damming however was the well used wooden hash pipe inside the baggie.
The girls looked vaguely disappointed.
"I was expecting a couple of ounces worth at least!" Said Lola.
"Yeah at least enough to steal a little bit!" Added Rachael."
"I think my mums hippie days of smoking are well over." said Vic," She's had the same amount in there ever since I knew about it."
"So," Lola said, the pain of an original thought slowing her speech and furrowing her brow "If we swapped the real stuff for the Oregano ..."
"She'd never notice!" finished Rachael beaming down on the dubious looking Vic.
"I don't know," Said Vic, slowly "Its a bit of a risk..."
-------
One careful replacement of herbs and application of a bic lighter later the girls were sitting with the box back in the lounge feeling a lot more relaxed about the whole situation.
Rachael who had for the last ten minutes been stroking the still open inside of the rosewood box said
"What's this box within a box?"
Vic couldn't tear her gaze away from the test pattern on the TV
"Hunh?"
"Hunh?"
"This box within a box?" Rachael said pulling out a miniature version of the rosewood box.
"Oh that." Said Vicki " I don't know I've never been able to get it open."
"I've seen one of these before," said Lola "give it here."
Reluctantly Rachael handed it over. It was roughly the size of a box of chocolates but felt quiet heavy for the actual size.
"Right, You've got to force the hinges on these things." Said Lola taking a strong grip on the box.
"Force it?" said Vic her eyes going wide "No no! No forcing! Gentle encouraging, yes. Forcing no!"
"Don't sweat it. I know what I'm doing!"
"I know what you're doing and I don't want you to do it! Stop"
"You want to know what's inside don't you?"
"No!"
Vic reached out towards Lola just in time to see her fumble and then drop the box. It spiralled down in slow motion catching the corner on the unyielding stone floor and breaking the lid off splitting the wood and spilling its contents under the sofa.
"What did you do? What did you do?"
"Vic. I'm really sorry." True regret burned dully in her friends eyes.
Vic glared at her and picked up the box and tried to start fitting it back together whilst Lola and Rachael started pick up the splinters scattered all over the floor.
"That's funny," Said Rachael from under the bed.
"What?" Said Vic failing to see the funny side of anything at the moment.
"The only thing that was in the box was this book," She replied holding aloft an aged well thumbed paperback.
"Is it porn?" Asked the suddenly interested Lola looking up from behind the side table.
"I don't think so. Unless someone's idea of a horny title is 'Notes from the Road'."
---------------
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Notes from....
I hate myself for saying this but I really like this one.
Its got the elements of what I was looking for with a brief nod to Hunter S Thompson and his description of Nixon "A man so twisted he needed help to screw his pants on in the morning."
Little did I know when I wrote this the joys of the current administration which is starting to make the arch-Demon himself look like an underachiever.
Anyways I had to make Madison leave to give Jack something to focus on as I was at that moment unhappily single and I didn't see why my fictious characters should be happy when I wasn't.
I'm a bit of a bastard like that!
Notes from the Road 11
The Bridal Suite was huge and largely pink.
"I feel like I'm putting on weight just looking at it." whispered Madison in my ear as the concierge showed us around. It felt like everything was made of sugared confectionary I was trying to imagine who would think this fantasy place would be the perfect setting for starting a life together. Apart from an eight year old girl raised on tales of frogs, magic and princes that is.
It took up most of the top floor with two bedrooms (master and guest) 3 bathrooms, reception area and sitting room featuring the largest TV I have ever seen. It dwarfed the fittings in the rest of the room looming out from one wall dominating the available space. No matter where you were you could not but help but be aware of it's presence
I unearthed the remote from beneath a plethora of pink cushions and comforters and turned it on to try it out. There was a political show on and I found myself being frowned upon by Richard Nixon enhanced to a massive scale. I could see every wrinkle and sweat droplet and at this magnification the junkie madness in his eyes from years of power abuse was unmistakeable.
It was an unpleasant reminder of the uncomfortable times we lived in. The ingrained patterns of lunacy that could allow a vicious, amoral subhuman like Nixon to be elected to absolute power by the people of this nation not once but twice. We like to believe that politicians are motivated by a higher purpose, a greater power but every once in a while a pigfucker like Nixon comes along to remind us of the painful reality they're vengeful greedy idiots just like the rest of us.
I turned the TV off in revulsion and unplugged it from the wall as a safety measure. I stood up and saw Bran looking at me with a puzzled expression.
"Nixon," I said pointing at the blank still domineering TV.
He nodded sagely as if this were a totally normal response and walked on through to the bathroom.
You would have thought that after sending all that time in the harsh environment of the desert we would have been lounging on the couches that seemed to almost swallow you, with the air con turned up to full, ordering room service like it was the last days of the Hiatt Regency in Saigon, basking in all the man made luxury we could get.
But we were having none of that fake comfort, sitting on the wooden balcony overlooking the lake, watching the pale, sickly moon rise slowly with all the artificial lights in the suite turned off, smoking endless cigarettes and sipping moon-warmed rum. The night was close and deep with the scent of the pine trees permeating the air with a fragrance so fresh that it ironically reminded me of newly scrubbed floors.
Bran had already departed heading straight for the master bedroom with the fairly pessimistic instructions not to wake him 'Until the first bombs start falling. Theirs mind you, not ours.'.
Dog was curled up out side Bran's room his scraggy brown coat looking stupidly out of place against the violent pink door. I was still unsure if he was house trained but so far he hadn't left us any unpleasant brown surprises so I felt the odds were good.
Madison and I were sitting facing the lake with the bottle and an unspoken feeling between us. She brushed a stray strand of that dirty blonde hair I had come to love, out of her eyes caught me looking and smiled.
"You okay?" She said still smiling at me.
"Yeah," I replied moving closer towards her until her heavenly profile was outlined against the moon. She drew herself closer to me and angled her head towards mine as I leant in and our lips met and merged. The delicate rhythm of our silent conversation spoke of yearning and passion that had lain hidden for far too long. When we reached the end of the sentence she broke off but without moving her head away said " Well that was a long time coming,"
I placed my hand behind her head, gently tangling my fingers in that enticing hair and drew her into me again.
-------------------
It was late morning when I awoke, I knew she was gone before my eyes were even open. I was still curled around the empty space her slim body had occupied in the bed. The guest bedroom was mercifully white and clean but still had hints of the hideous pink that suffocated the rest of the suite.
I swung myself out of bed, stretched and caught sight of myself in the mirror fixed on the wall and grinned at a freeze-frame flashback of last night, playing in the cinema of my mind.
I found my trousers hanging from the light shade and pulled them on walking into the main lounge shielding my eyes against the morning sun and spotting Bran on the balcony.
He had his shirt off and one of those foil sun screens that must have come with the room, wedged under his chin trying to top up his already considerable tan. he looked like a gigantic turkey half wrapped in foil ready for the oven.
I found my shades and cigarettes on the table and walked out into the blinding light up to the rail looking out to mountains.
"She's gone hasn't she?" I said without looking to Bran by way of morning greeting, lighting the first of that days smokes.
"Yep."
"When I say gone I mean real gone, not like she just popped out for milk or something. She's left for good hasn't she?"
"Yep."
"Was I really that bad?" I asked only half joking.
"I found this," Said Bran and handed me a piece of stationary with my name inked on it in a delicate hand I recognised as hers.
----
Jack,
I'm sorry things turned out like this. I didn't mean to leave straight after what happened but I had already decided to go before last night. There are just some things I have to do and work through on my own. You and Bran have been great road buddies but its time for me to move on again.
When my time for travel is over I'll find you again, we have much unfinished business. Stay happy and stay in the phone book. I will find you.
Give my love to Bran and Dog,
Madison.
----
The sun continued to shine and the bird continued to sing but something inside just turned to ash as my heart broke.
"We'd better go." Said Bran interjecting on my little world of misery.
"Yeah, ..."
"They've probably run a credit check on that card I gave them by now and found my name isn't Stefan Maraschino."
I stared at Bran open mouthed as a polite yet firm knocking on the door began.
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