Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  So Donnie had to die. I did some research before I killed him, and came to the conclusion that this man was an arrogant, bombastic fuck up. He thought of himself as an idealist and a democrat, but in his spare time he cheated on his wife and didn’t love his kids and slapped prostitutes around to get his kicks. But even so, he didn’t deserve to die.

  I followed him home, after he’d been drinking and whoring. I wore shoes with hard heels so he’d hear the tapping of my footsteps behind him. I followed him down the dimly lit alleys of Gomorrah, the club district. I watched him hailing skytaxis, waving his arm and tottering around like a drunk, because he was drunk. And when he fell over and passed out, I picked him up and carried him to the river and bathed his face until he woke up. And when he woke he smiled up at me and I said, “Payback Donnie.”

  Then I killed him. A hammer-fist strike to the forehead. His skull caved in instantly. I cut off his middle fingers, so that when the body was found, it would be evident he had failed the test of loyalty to the Clan.

  And I felt nothing. No remorse. No compassion.

  Daxox was pleased.

  Remember, these were dark times. The Corporation ruled supreme. Violence was everywhere.

  Do you remember? Of course you do.

  But do you know anything about what it was like before those days? Of course you don’t. Why would you?

  Daxox was one of the cleverest men I’d ever met. But he’d never heard of Abraham Lincoln. Or John F. Kennedy. Or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or Chairman Mao, or Genghis Khan, or the Roman Empire, or the Italian Renaissance. These subjects hadn’t been taught at school for – well, for who knows how many years. Of course, all the data about these subjects is carefully archived. It’s available to view in your brainchip, or in the QRCs, if you bother to look. But no one bothers. For most people, history begins in the year Peter Smith invaded Planet Earth. The rest dustily resides on wooden shelves, metaphorically and literally. (Remember I come from Rebus, where they have real books.)

  But I knew it all.

  I’d charted a path through human history from barbarism to civilisation to anarchy to civilisation, to barbarism once more. I’d seen the ebbs and flows. I’d absorbed the myriad philosophies, including the quaintly idealistic liberal egalitarianism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The period when “human rights” developed as a guiding moral concept, and people actually believed the world might become a better and a fairer place. Seems totally fucking unlikely, doesn’t it? But it’s true, that’s what the poor saps thought.

  So I knew about all these historical concepts. I understood what morality was. And I had, I actually did have, a moral code. I just chose not to use it.

  And I knew too that never, not ever, in the whole course of human history, had the human spirit been so deformed and mutated as it was in the days of the Galactic Corporation. It all went on for so fucking long you see. Over so many planets. Involving so many lives. Earthian Gamers. Doppelgänger addicts. Blood-crazed warriors. Brainwashed Soldiers. In other times, these would have been the scum of society. Instead, they were the ruling élite.

  This is me ranting, by the way. I do that from time to time.

  My point is: I was a killing machine. But I was no worse than anyone else.

  Here’s some of the stuff I used to do:

  I was a bodyguard. Daxox had enemies, plenty of them, and I monitored his personal security. I identified significant threats, aka nutjobs out to kill him, and I killed them first. Without warning.

  Here’s me arriving at the front door of Christian, an evangelical nutjob convinced that Daxox was the devil incarnate. I’m dressed like a priest of the New Light – you know, black robes, a black hood, bloodshot eyes. Christian greets me with delight, recognising a kindred spirit.

  “May our God be with you,” he says, and I nod and bow and God be with you him back.

  Then a moment later, I take out my projectile gun and shoot an exploding bullet into his chest. It’s low velocity, fast enough to punch a hole through his ribs then lodge in his abdominal cavity.

  “Newsflash: there is no God,” I tell him, and his face loses its optimistic glow.

  Then his body blows up.

  The explosion rips his carcass apart. He dies with a look of bafflement on his face. My black robes turn crimson.

  Then I slip off the robe and leap on to the getaway flybike. I’ll always remember Christian. His fountain of blood and gore.

  And here’s me—No, there are too many. Just too many. Daxox trusted me, because I was a methodical researcher, skilled at identifying behaviour patterns and threat vectors. And he liked it when I came back soaked in blood and elated. And, after almost every hit, we would fuck on the white sheets of his bed.

  Other stuff I did: riding shotgun, on armed robbery raids. Fighting in no-blows-barred wrestling bouts against enforcers from other mobs. That was a betting scam. No one ever thought I could win, but I always did. And—

  And so it goes on. Eight years in all, eight years in which I grew from a girl into a woman. Eight years in which I killed hundreds of fellow human beings. And gambled. And beat up or intimidated shitbags. And revelled in massacres and bloodbaths.

  That’s how I was back then, in the golden days of the Corporation regime. Gangster. Killer. Quintino’s moll. An all too willing member of the criminal society that enforced the status quo on a Corporation-owned planet.

  The shy librarian’s daughter turned into ice-cold blood-crazed killer.

  And I loved it. Every moment of it.

  What did I see in him? Daxox, I mean.

  Well, it wasn’t his looks. He had a face like a frog, and a physique to match. He was ugly and squat in a universe where all men looked like Greek gods. But all that was appealing to me. Because it meant he looked real.

  Plus he was funny. A great sense of humour. What can I say? I like that in a man.

  He told me about his father, who had been a factory worker in one of the vast vehicle fabricator plants in the wilderness territories to the north-east of Laguid. Daxox’s dad would get up to work at 4 a.m. And he would spend twelve hours a day, six days a week monitoring the safe functioning of robot-controlled machinery, with not even a break for lunch, and a catheter in lieu of a toilet break. Then he would return home exhausted to an equally weary wife and five needy children.

  Every Saturday morning, Daxox explained, the local Clan cammorista would come by to receive his dues. In the form of sleek flybikes and space-faring flying cars, stolen by Daxox’s father from the fabricator plant. The penalty for pilfering was death, but workers weren’t given a choice about this. If they did not steal, they would die. If they stole and were caught, they would die. It was a gamble either way.

  The Clan cammorista was, so Daxox told me, a formidable and brutal man. As well as being a lecher and a bully. One time he was abusive to Daxox’s mother and instructed her to give him a blowjob in front of her children. Daxox was only ten years old at the time, and he said, “What’s a blowjob?” And the gangster laughed, and explained.

  And Daxox’s father wept. And Daxox’s mother went down upon her knees to perform the wretched deed, whilst imploring everyone in her family to calm down and be sensible.

  At which moment, enraged, ten-year-old Daxox killed the cammorista. With a silver sabre manufactured in his father’s own factory. That’s how legends are born. That’s how Daxox joined the Clan.

  From then on, his parents were protected from bullying Clannites. There was always food on the table, and Daxox and his brothers and sisters were always well and fashionably dressed. They even had a family flycar, with enough free fuel to circumnavigate the globe. His mother was treated like a queen by Clannites who met her. His father, however, was caught pilfering and was executed. That was how it went.

  In those days, Daxox told me, the gangs on Cúchulainn were fragmented, unable to coalesce into unity as the Clannites had done on other settler planets. But by the time Daxox was eighteen, the capobas
tone Julian Silver had forged a planet-wide alliance of killers, psychopaths and shake-down artists. And Silver was of course in regular touch with the Clannites on other planets in the Solar Neighbourhood. They formed a tightly-knit virtual community. And many of the codes and symbols of the Clan were created in those early years.

  Daxox himself claims to have designed the dragon tattoo that reveals a Clannite to be a blooded killer with twenty murders committed and authenticated. And, in due course, he worked his way up the hierarchy. From piccioto, to cammorista, then santista, then vangelista, until finally at the age of fifty he was quintino of Cúchulainn, part of the Clanning that included Golgotha, Ulster, Red Hand, and Celtica.

  Daxox taught me much of Clan values. I learned to speak their secret language, the murmurash. I could read the tattoos of a killer and know his life story. I learned that one must never have sexual intercourse in the same house as a Clannite who is eating. I learned that menstrual blood has holy properties. I learned that every Clannite has a personal god, and must swear upon that god to honour the values of the Clan. (My god then was, and still is, Ganesh, the elephant god. Don’t ask me why.) I learned that every Clannite must obey without question the orders of the capobastone and be at all times his loyal finger – in other words, his underling.

  All this was new to me, despite my extensive reading as a child on all matters historical – for there have never been any books written about the Clan.8 (Or rather, there have been, but they have never been published, and their authors have all been true-murdered.) And so I was fascinated at the way an entire parallel civilisation had been created in the midst of an oppressive dictatorship.

  And fascinated too at how the Corporation used the Clan to do their dirty work. Admittedly, there were doppelgänger robots everywhere. But it was an open secret that there was a dire shortage of Earthians willing to operate these doppelgänger bodies for long tedious shifts of duty.

  So instead, for much of the time, on many of the Corporation planets, the Clan enforced the rule of law.

  Or rather, the rule of no-law. A law which means everyone is stolen from.

  And it worked. By and large. After all, it’s not the first time such a system has been in operation. I mean, look at the United States of America, in the years after Obama! Or – anyway, enough history lessons.

  The point I’m making is this: Daxox and I were happy. We really were. Old frog-face! I came to love, I really did, the ugly bastard.

  Then, I don’t know why – maybe he was bored? Broke? Wanted to teach me a lesson? – Daxox gave me to Baron Lowman, who was also a quintino in the Cúchulainn Clanning.

  He just gave me away! As if I were a – a car. Or a bottle of wine. “Take a drink from this, Baron!” “Don’t mind if I do, thank you!!”

  And that’s when the bad stuff happened.

  Years of it.

  Nine years six months four days, to be precise.

  But I’m not going to talk about all the bad stuff. I’m figuring you already know, or have guessed, enough to get the gist.

  The truth is, it wasn’t that bad. I was treated well, at least when I was off duty. I went swimming most days, I was allowed to go hiking in the mountains of Cúchulainn. And I have a high pain threshold, and heal fast. So it many ways, it was like a job. Monday to Friday, and sometimes Sunday mornings. I could handle it. I really could.

  But the point is, I was a slave. A chip in the head slave. Sometimes, for a gag, Baron Lowman would make me dance, by moving a virtual puppet synced to my brainchip, so that my limbs would—

  Enough.

  The short version of a long story is: I escaped, eventually. I fled the planet. I recuperated. And then I came back, ready to take revenge.

  Revenge for the nine years, six months and four days.

  And now—

  Blood was dripping down my body. I could feel its warmth oozing along my torso and legs, and I knew I was leaving a red trail behind me as I walked. One bullet had hit a lung, and it had fragmented inside me. I was rasping with pain each time I breathed. I climbed up the stairs to my apartment, very slowly, using the wall and the banisters like twin crutches. I didn’t want to risk the elevator, for fear that once I stopped moving I would collapse. I got a few strange looks, but only a few. This was a city where people kept themselves to themselves.

  I blacked out and found myself on the floor of my apartment and guessed I must have climbed the last two flights of stairs whilst technically unconscious. I staggered to my feet, eventually, and cut my clothes off myself with my knife. Stood under the shower and rinsed off the blood. Then I got a suction gun and thrust it into my abdomen and sucked the bullets out. The slug in my lung I didn’t dare try to reach. I sprayed the skin with healant, and glued the bullet-holed flesh together. I noted that the entire apartment now resembled an abattoir. Then I swallowed three vials of premium rejuve.

  It had all gone wrong.

  I’d timed my attack to coincide with Baron Lowman’s monthly meeting with Daxox at the Dahlia Club.

  Daxox had gone up in the world by now – he was capobastone of the Clanning, and Lowman was one of his five loyal quintini. So Daxox’s security was formidable. But it was all focused outside the club. He hadn’t anticipated that someone might burrow beneath his fortified palace.

  So my plan was to surprise the two of them in the club’s back room, as they wheeled and dealed and discussed how to handle the new flesh they had acquired for their houses of sin.

  I’d paid a tunneller – nice guy, called Gav, he had his own equipment and made his living doing this shit – to create a subway under the club. And my plan was to burrow, surface, then catch them off guard as they discussed their Clan affairs.

  But I was sold out. Gav sold me out.

  This is what happened:

  Gav and I touched fists. He was a fat, anxious-looking man, with the minimum of social skills; so of course I liked him. It was geek to geek bonding. I think he may also have been sexually attracted to me; I have a recollection of – well, let’s not go there.

  “Good luck, killer!” Gav beamed.

  I wondered what kind of avatar Gav might have; then I saw the tattoo on his neck. Yeah. Cool black dude with Loper teeth; that figured. My own avatar is – no matter.

  Then I dived into the tunnel. It was a tight fit, I was wriggling my hips against the mortarbond walls Gav had injected. It was a quarter of a mile underground to reach the club. It took me four hours. I was wearing a warsuit, breathing from an oxygen cylinder. I began to wonder what would happen if I never got out. Or if the walls began to contract and crush me; like being choked in a python’s gut. Or—

  I was thinking too much. Eventually I got a bleep on my MI that told me I’d reached my destination. I pointed my plasma pistol and blasted my way up. The tunnel filled with rubble, and I clambered through, out of the earth, and levered myself up on to the charred floorboards of the club’s stock room.

  I got to my feet and took a deep breath. Opened the door of the stockroom and stepped into the corridor, and walked through into the club itself. I was silent as a shadow, and stealthed from sonar and visuals.

  And then I saw him, in the table in the corner snug that had always been his favourite: Daxox. Two girls were with him, and Baron Lowman too. I drew my gun and prepared to launch my assault.

  But as I did so, I sensed the wrongness of it all.

  It was too quiet. Daxox and Lowman weren’t breathing; the girls weren’t talking. The bar staff were there, two men and a woman, but they weren’t chinking glasses, or gossiping.

  And there was no smell of flowery perfume. Instead, just the musky aroma of sweat, and a tang of neat whisky.

  And – I don’t know what else. I just knew this was a trap.

  Then the holos of Lowman and Daxox vanished and I took four projectile bullets in the body from unseen killers – explosive cannon-fired shells that ripped through my warsuit as if it were made of cloth. And then I was hit with an energy pulse that almost
shattered my force field.

  I hurled a flash grenade at my unseen attackers and the room was lit by a flare, which dazzled them but left me (with my augmented eyes) able to see. Then I threw a blast grenade in the direction from which the first bullet had been fired, drew my twin pearl-handled (I’m always the show-off) plasma pistols, and shot my way out of there.

  It took a while. There were six of them in all, battle-hardened veterans. But I was faster, and able to fire accurately in the midst of an apocalypse, and I was carrying enough flash grenades and ultrasound pops to deafen and blind an army. When they were dead I left through the front door.

  Gav, I knew, would be long gone. I’d never be able to punish him for his treachery. Lowman and Daxox had been forewarned. My plan had failed. And now I was wounded; and once they replayed the club’s camera footage, they would know who I was.

  I’d lost my two most powerful weapons – my aura of infallibility, and my mystique.

  And they’d hurt me bad. I’d almost died in the club that night; and still might.

  Picture this:

  Here’s me, young and pretty and dressed like a princess in a tale of the Arabian Nights. The door to my room opens and a Sultan enters. Only he’s not a Sultan, he’s the Laguid Chief of Police and his name is Robbie Ferguson.

  And I want to kill him but I can’t. And I want to run away but I can’t. And I want to shout and scream but I can’t.

  Because they own my head. They can kill me just by pressing a button. They can make me dance, they can move my limbs. They can ride me like a doppelgänger robot. So I have to be a slave. Because if I’m not a slave, I will be something even less than a slave.

  “Hello Robbie,” I say, smiling.

  And here’s me with Baron Lowman.

  Yeah, he’s a looker, I can’t deny it. In another life, I might have taken him as a lover. Tall, slim, with a smile that’s like sunshine cutting through a cloudy day.

  See me with him: He’s buying me dinner, being nice to me. I’m wearing beautiful clothes, though not many of them. Lowman is a fabulous flirt, and part of his magic is that he can make the people he enslaves feel they are valued, and should enjoy their own captivity.