Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  And so, sometimes, I actually believe I am enjoying myself.

  That’s the worst of it. He deludes me into thinking I am happy.

  And here’s me bleeding to death in my lonely apartment room. Consumed with bitter regret that my revenge has failed.

  “In five years’ time, Artemis, you’ll have your freedom. Imagine.” This is Baron Lowman, back in the days of my captivity, taunting me. He used to do that a lot.

  “I can imagine,” I say, through gritted teeth. “I can!”

  I wake up. The bleeding has stopped. I haven’t died. I just passed out, from lack of blood, and shock.

  I take off the dressing and inspect my wounds, using the mirror in my bedroom to aid me. The skin on the entry wounds is joining together. There’ll be scars, but they will fade with time. The bullet in the lungs is what worries me, but I’ve injected rejuve spray to coat the alveoli. The tissue should eventually grow around the projectile slug and its many vicious fragments, making them part of my body. Maybe, I conclude, this is not so bad after all.

  Then I cough. Blood torrents out and drenches my bedroom carpet. I puke. More blood. Bright crimson. Arterial.

  Oh fuck, I think to myself, I’m dying.

  Picture this: Baron Lowman, smiling. He is happy with me, for reasons which I will not recount.

  His teeth are capped with diamonds. For all his beauty, it is a repellent smile.

  “Come,” he tells me, diamond-smiling, “here.”

  “Hello Baron.”

  Lowman blinks at me.

  “How…?”

  Twelve years have passed since the memory I just had of Lowman with his diamond teeth glinting. Six hours have passed since I was pumped full of bullets and started to die.

  And yet, now I am in the Baron’s private sanctum, dressed in black body armour. Hair loose. I am shorter and less voluptuous than the Artemis the Baron knew, and my face is different. He doesn’t recognise me. But he knows, of course, I pose a threat to him.

  The gun in my hand kinda gives that away.

  “Call for help,” I suggest.

  He triggers the alarm in his brain chip. The signal doesn’t transmit. He sits down and presses the actual physical alarm button under his desk, that connects straight to the Rec Room where his piccioti hang out. But the line is disconnected.

  “Try shouting,” I suggest.

  “Come the fuck in here!” screams Lowman to his bodyguards waiting outside the door. But it is a soundproofed penthouse. They can’t hear him.

  “I’ve been waiting for this a long time,” I say, mildly.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I tap a hand against my chest, meaning my heart.

  “You’re the fucking Heartstealer?”

  “I am.”

  “I thought we had killed you in the Dahlia Club,” he says, sounding vexed. “You were wounded, we found the blood.”

  “I’m a fast healer,” I say, which is an exaggeration, to say the least; since I am at that very moment spitting out rivers of blood in the sink of my apartment.

  “Well, I’m impressed.”

  And Lowman smiles. His diamond teeth once more glint.

  Then a plasma pistol appears in his hand and he fires.

  The plasma burst passes through my holo harmlessly.

  “I did wonder about that,” he says mildly. “What are you – a video call?”

  “Kind of.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  To his credit, he shows no trace of fear.

  “I tagged you,” I say. “Pellet in the brain. A week ago, while you were in the restaurant with that blonde girl, the perfume model. I can control your retinal impulses now. I can patch a video call through right into your brain.”

  He stares at me. He doesn’t know whether to believe me.

  “Dragon,” I say, and his eyes widen. He is seeing a dragon. He flinches, and I guess that it is billowing flame at him.

  “Nice trick,” he observes.

  “Thank you. Do you recognise me?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “The waitress.”

  He remembers, finally.

  “The clumsy one.”

  “You spilled the drink on—”

  “I spilled the drink, you called me a useless fucking ginch. Your girlfriend calmed you down. And I patted you on the shoulder. That’s when I injected you. Needle in my finger – into your neck – into your bloodstream. Into your brain. A tiny pellet full of nanotech. Which grows and grows. It’s an organic bomb, and it’s inside you. It’s been gestating for days. If you had a tomograph, you’d see—” I make a Big Hands gesture. Meaning, Huge Bomb In Your Brain.

  “No…” groaned Lowman.

  “Look,” I say to Baron Lowman, and then I am once again inside his brain. Inside his visual cortex, connecting up with his brain chip. I use Magog, the Cúchulainn QRC, to down images from my own memory chip then transmit them into Lowman’s own mind.

  And I show him images of me as I had been, as he remembered me.

  “It’s you?” he says, appalled.

  “It’s me. Artemis. The one who got away.”

  He is awed at the thought. For none of his slaves had ever escaped from their Clan captivity before I did; or, so I’m assured, since.

  “Bitch,” he snarls.

  Then I fill his visual cortex with images of horror. Monsters conjured up from the darkest recesses of his unconsciousness. His own bogeymen made manifest. Until has body starts to tremble and twitch, and his eyes are filled with fear.

  “You don’t fucking scare me,” he sneers, but I am in his mind and I know he is lying.

  He is lying!

  His fear consumes him. It eats him, chews his balls, steals his courage and his composure and leaves him a quivering, slavering wreck.

  He pisses himself.

  He—

  My revenge is complete. I wonder if I should let him live. So that the memory of this humiliation will be with him for as long as he lives.

  I decide not.

  And, from the virtual control panel in the blood-spattered bedroom of my apartment, I detonate the organic bomb I had planted in his brain.

  And a moment later, with the eyes of my holo-avatar, I see Baron Lowman’s head blow up. His thoughts turn to blood and spattered grey cells. His eyes literally spit out of his skull. It is—

  Well, I’ve never seen anything like it.

  Then my holo-avatar vanished and I was me again. I was puking blood, and weak, and desperately ill.

  But the plan had worked. Thanks to the nano-pellet, and the powers of Magog, I had been able to kill Lowman by remote control.

  But I had failed in my real objective. My plan had always been to kill Daxox last. But he was the hardest of all to get to; and I’d left it too late. My raid on his club had been a fiasco. And now I was dying and I would never have another chance.

  And then – I remember this moment well – I huddled on the floor and wept. Yes, it’s true, I wept, like a small child.

  But after a few minutes of humiliation I pulled myself together, and I made a decision.

  I would survive this. I would endure, and rejuve, and get myself back to fighting fitness again. And then I’d start all over: I would kill Daxox. And my revenge would be complete. All this, I vowed.

  And so I made a call to Jimmi Shapter.

  Let me tell you about Jimmi; my friend Jimmi.

  Jimmi used to work for me, back in the day, when I was working for Daxox. He was one of my team, and a good earner too. And his speciality – yeah, okay, I know it sounds bad – was sex. Jimmi slept with women for money and I was his business manager. In other words; he was the whore to my pimp.

  And Jimmi, in my defence, was my friend as well as employee. I never hurt him. In fact, I never hurt or even spoke unkindly to any of the girls and guys who worked at Daxox’s sex houses, when I was his right hand guy. And the hookers were all pros, in it for the money – none of them were coerced.

&
nbsp; Hell it was better than killing people for a living. Which was what I mostly did.

  The truth is, I always got on well with the whores. They were storytellers, most of them, and junkies, all of them. Jimmi was hooked on raves; they put him in a euphoric state and banished his late-night blues. He’d once been suicidal, as a teenager and a young man, but no more. Now he was drugged all the time and happy as – well, I’ve never known anyone happier.

  An hour after receiving my call, he arrived. Finding him had been a bitch. Eventually, I’d MI’d a club I used to go to, and spoke to a guy, who spoke to a guy. I didn’t give my name, I just left the message, “The foul-mouthed bitch who used to call you Jimmi Boy needs you.” And my address.

  And now, here Jimmi was.

  “Artemis?” he said sceptically.

  “Jimmi Boy,” I croaked, in greeting.

  Jimmi was looking good. Older, definitely. His hair was greying. He had laughter lines around his eyes. His freckles had darkened. But he was dapper in a suit and a buttoned up shirt and jewelled eyelashes.

  I, by contrast, looked like shit. I’d crawled on to the rug in the living space of my apartment. I was dehydrated, and the place stank. My blood loss was extreme, and I could hardly speak. Oh and to further confuse things: I’d had facial and body reconstruction so I looked nothing like the woman he’d once known.

  “Yeah it’s me,” I said. And amazingly, he accepted that.

  “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “No hospitals.”

  “Then I’ll call a doctor.”

  “No doctor.”

  “Then what?”

  “Stay with me. Give me water. If I die, burn the body,” I said.

  And then I passed out.

  It was a risk, but I was desperate.

  You see, the rejuve wasn’t working. I had internal injuries which were bleeding out. The bullet fragments were drifting around inside my lungs, causing more and more damage. I was sure I had an embolism in one leg. I needed major surgery, but I didn’t dare risk seeing any kind of doctor, because these guys all have to report in. So I needed someone to babysit me while my body tried to heal itself. Hence, Jimmi.

  It was a calculated risk, but I knew I could trust him.

  With the wisdom of hindsight, however, I realise I should not have taken that risk. I had no right.

  For Jimmi was the kindest of men. A generous friend. A good soul. And he did not deserve what happened. He should not have died the way he did.

  Jimmi – forgive me?

  I was in a fevered frenzy for two weeks, shitting fluid and vomiting copiously and losing more blood than a pig in an abattoir. I didn’t exactly sleep but nor was I truly conscious. But whenever I was well enough to see and to register what I saw, I realised that Jimmi was there. “Shush shush,” he would say.

  Sometimes he would sing to me. Gershwin, or Clay & Mielder, or ballads by Spiegel. He had a lovely voice.

  The days passed. I could not eat, and I was vomiting all the time. So I became emaciated, like a skeleton. I could not bear for Jimmi to see me naked, but he had to bathe me, and put me on the toilet, and wipe my arse. I was in a state of total fatigue, as my body rallied to heal its injuries.

  When he walked me in the park he used to tell people I was his gran.

  I had lost all my hair by that point, and my skin no longer had the softness and sheen of youth. I was wrinkled and weak, and I stared suspiciously out at the world. I used twin crutches to get around; and I grew tired very easily. But I was, without a doubt, on the mend.

  “Remember the old days?” I asked him, as I crutched slowly along by the lake, where an eyrar of swans glided elegantly upon on the water, and chimaerical fish with the heads of apes leaped.

  “I don’t like to,” he said, grinning, remembering.

  “Whatever happened to Charleene?” Loud mouthed Charleene, always the first to start an argument.

  “Dead. OD, happy juice. She liked to be happy.”

  “Sylvia?”

  “Married to an architect.”

  “She cashed in then.”

  “She did.”

  “Marco?”

  “I lived with him for twenty years then we divorced.”

  “Marco was an arsehole.”

  “So I discovered.”

  “It took you twenty years to—”

  “Yeah, like you were so smart. Nine years as a sex slave.”

  I paused for breath. The sun warmed my skin; and then the wind cooled it again. It felt good to be alive, even if barely.

  “Wasn’t my choice,” I retorted, eventually.

  “I know.”

  “Bastard Daxox.”

  “I love you, Artemis.”

  I made a fuck-off face and then, to underline my point, I said:

  “Fuck off!”

  Jimmi had often slept with women in the course of duty, but he was exclusively gay in his heart of hearts. He had never desired me. But he was my best friend. And I loved him more than words could, you know.

  “I look gorgeous don’t I?” he asked me coyly, as we stood by the lake one day. “I’m a real hunk?”

  “You are, and you do.”

  “You look pretty hot too,” he teased.

  “Liar.”

  “In my eyes,” said Jimmi, “you’ll always be beautiful. Despite the bags under your eyes. And the wrinkles. And the liver spots.”

  “And the bald head.”

  “I like the bald head.”

  Once my bullet wounds were healed, and the alveoli in my lung had grown back, and the embolism had gone from the vein in my leg, I began to grow younger.

  It’s a nice feeling.

  Jimmi and I still walked in the park every morning before he went to work. He ran a club now, a piano bar. Clan-controlled of course, but relatively respectable.

  The skies were always black with foully polluted clouds, but the sun shone most days. And the trees were magnificent, and birds perched on their branches, and lizards pinned themselves to tree trunks. And dogs walked themselves whilst their indolent owners snoozed on benches. I was a grey haired lady by now, with one stick instead of two crutches. And Jimmi always beamed and nodded at the lithe young joggers who ran past, and they all loved him for being kind to his old gran.

  But after a few weeks I ditched the stick and my legs were stronger and we picked up the pace a little. My hair was salt and pepper now. And I had a fierce expression, and the innately nosy glare of the old studying the foibles of the young, and wondering which particular idiotic mistakes they will make first.

  A few weeks later still and my hair was black and my skin was lively with laughter lines, rather than etched with scars of age. And Jimmi looked like my grown-up son.

  A few weeks later still, and we could have been brother and sister, ambling in the park.

  A few weeks after that, we ran in vests and shorts, sweat oiling our bodies as we sprinted along the rambling paths. We outran dogs and even a pony, and won admiring stares from the hardbodies out for their early morning training sessions.

  From grandmother to horny youth in less than eight weeks. It was like living my life in reverse.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  They were tickets: small, red, plastic.

  “I have a friend, on the cargo caravan. They’re taking passengers. We could go,” Jimmi confided.

  “To Earth.”

  “Or anywhere else en route.”

  “You and me?”

  “Me and you.”

  “Is that a proposal?”

  “Hell no, you ain’t got a dick,” Jimmi protested.

  “You want to run away with me?”

  “I want to rescue you.”

  I smiled, almost.

  “I still have to do… what I have to do,” I told him.

  Jimmi smiled a little while longer. Then he stopped smiling, and the tears came. I couldn’t believe how fast it happened. His face was twisted with pain and his cheeks were actually da
mp.

  “Give it up, Artemis!” said Jimmi. And in his eyes was written the desperate grief of his soul.

  “I can’t.”

  “They’ll kill you. Sooner or later, they’ll kill you.”

  “Let them.”

  The next day I murdered Lucian Brody in a nightclub on Parkcross. He was in the toilet cubicle shooting up with frenzies. I climbed over the cubicle wall and caught him before he could pull his trousers up, then stabbed him to death with a knife in the skull. His face embodied shock, his expression frozen rigid at the moment of death. Then I did the heart trick. I cut it out, I put it in his mouth.

  Then I left the toilet, closing the cubicle door behind me, and exited the nightclub. The bass beats shook my body. A couple were fucking on the stairs. I had to step over them. They were wild, high on lib, the aphrodisiac drug. I wondered if they’d ever met before tonight. They didn’t even notice that my shirt was crimson with blood.

  Later, I hosed and scrubbed myself in a warehouse I was renting. Lucian had been a security guard at the Baron’s place. He’d once brought me back after I had tried and failed to escape, before I’d understood about the whedon chip in my brain. My body was in convulsions, the pain in my head was crippling me, I couldn’t speak or think and could barely breathe. But that hadn’t stopped Lucian from—

  Whatever. He was dead now. Justice had been served.

  I slept at the warehouse. And the next morning I went for my regular walk, expecting to see Jimmi in the park, but he wasn’t there.

  I guessed immediately. They’d tracked him down.

  Jimmi was of course on my list of known associates. It was obvious, with hindsight, that they would find and interrogate him. I knew Jimmi would never talk, but I feared how much pressure they would bring to bear on him before they realised that.

  It took me six days to find the interrogation centre where he was being grilled. And two hours to break in and kill the guards. Jimmi was in a bad way. I carried him out on my shoulders, and took him to a safe house I had rented for this purpose, where I had medical facilities lined up.