Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  They’d tortured him of course. That meant, I realised, that they’d been torturing ALL the people who used to know me. All of them. Just on the off chance.

  That made me feel – not so good.

  Naturally, once I realised what was happening, I wanted to take bloody revenge for what those bastards had done to Jimmi. And indeed, what they had done to all my other friends and acquaintances!

  But a quick reality check told me that the more I took revenge, the more the innocent people who used to share a beer and a chat with me would suffer.

  My head was pounding at the thought of it.

  I realised I had become a human plague. All the people who had known me once upon a time would be tortured, or would die. Damned for the sin of having met me and liked me.

  It was an appalling thought.

  But at least I’d saved Jimmi. Or so I believed, at first. But when I injected him with rejuve he turned scarlet and began to convulse and I had to inject the antidote. I set the autodoc to diagnostic and fed it blood and tissue samples and it came up with a reason: Jimmi was DNR. Do Not Rejuve.

  The reason – it didn’t take much figuring out – he was a juve junkie.

  That’s why he had the grey hairs and the wrinkles. He must have been forced to quit rejuve after severe overdosage of the drug. And now he was ageing at a natural rate.

  Ageing!

  Jimmi was unconscious still, and I sang to him for a little while. It was his favourite Gershwin song – they were brothers, you know, George wrote the music, Ira wrote the words – “Someone To Watch Over Me.” Do you know it?

  Jimmi couldn’t hear me.

  I nursed Jimmi as best I could, day and night. And I brooded, a lot, about how he had become such a total fuck-up.

  I mean! I’ve come across every perversion known to humankind. But juve junkies baffle even me. I was stunned to find that Jimmi had gone down that road.

  Or maybe I’m kidding myself; maybe I do understand the appeal of juve, only too well.

  It’s the exhilaration, of course. And I’d felt it too, as my badly wounded body had healed. That joy of pain turning to pleasure. Wounds healing. Age reversing. Some people love it so much they crash flycars into walls or cut off their own limbs, in order to experience the thrill of rejuve healing.

  After a while, the body can’t take it. Rejuve no longer works.

  You become truly human again. Not to be recommended.

  Jimmi had been badly hurt by his torturers. They’d used pain not drugs. Because of course you can’t use drugs on a juve junkie. I hated them for what they had done. I wanted to—

  No more. I realised I had to give up all thoughts of revenge. It was my job now – my duty – to save Jimmi.

  Here’s what I did, and why.

  To get this, you need to understand that rejuve is a drug that enhances the healing powers of all human beings. But I’m augmented.

  That makes me better than human. More than human. It’s my genes that control my healing process, rejuve merely helps me, as a top-up. But my body has cells that are genetically hardwired not to die or to age. My limbs will regenerate, given time, if you cut them off. (It takes fucking years without a dash of rejuve though.) And my blood, too, is rich in healing factor.

  So that’s what I did. I swapped our blood.

  That’s a slight medical exaggeration of course. But even so, it’s pretty much what I did. I hooked Jimmi up to a pump and sucked as much blood out of his body as I dared. Then I did the same to my own body. And then I flicked a switch and the machine began to pump my fresh augmented blood into Jimmi’s arteries.

  Of course, you can’t squeeze a human being entirely dry of blood, it’s not like squeezing an orange. But it felt that way. Like I was emptied of juice, a squeezed fruit. I felt as weak as a new-born kitten after its owner has tried to drown it in a sack.

  However, Jimmi now had several litres of my energising augmented blood coursing through his veins and arteries. Giving him new life and energy.

  His broken bones didn’t heal, but they did stop hurting. His internal bleeding dribbled to a halt. His damaged kidneys sputtered back into life. His fire-burned lungs (they’d poured petrol down his throat) allowed him to breathe freely again. His battered face was restored to something like its normal beauty, apart from the broken nose. And after two days of healing, he opened his eyes.

  “I feel great,” Jimmi said, cheerfully. Though his voice was faint, so very faint.

  “Let’s go dancing,” I said.

  It was a glorious night. Three moons in the sky. Stars twinkling. Glorious jazz music from the late twenty-second century being played by the house band. This was a retro place – the Lady Day Bar – and it was Jimmi’s favourite dance hall.

  I wore a sleeveless gown that I had bought in a shop on Clancey Avenue, that hugged my figure and left nowhere to hide a gun. I had a small energy pulser in my purse but that was just out of habit. This was not the time or the place for a shooting war.

  We ordered champagne and told bawdy stories about cocks and quims and magnificent whores until the customers at the surrounding tables were either enraged or entranced at our bohemian vulgarity. Then Jimmi and I went out on to the dance floor and we danced.

  Jimmi was a marvellous dancer. He always had been. The other whores had always said he was the god of dance. He could sway like leaves shifting in the wind. He made even me look good. He wore a black “tuxedo” suit and a hat and when his body moved, it felt as if the air around him was applauding, you hear what I’m saying? Before long the other dancers stopped and peeled away to watch him. Jimmi’s moves weren’t fast or fancy, but he had a grace that distilled all reality into the sway of hips and the roll of shoulders and the twist of torso this way, then that.

  “One more dance,” he whispered, and we danced one more dance.

  “One more dance,” he whispered, and we danced one more dance.

  “One more,” he whispered, and then he collapsed.

  People started screaming. I knelt beside Jimmi and kissed him full on the lips, so that he would die kissing me. It didn’t take long.

  Then I got up and tried to walk away but security guards stopped me, assuming that Jimmi was a drug addict and that so was I. The guards were not battle-trained warriors, but even so, they were muscular and armoured and there were many of them. In my blood-drained and weakened state, without a halfway decent gun, I knew I had no chance of defeating them.

  They led me to the security office and did a routine retina scan and ten minutes later they discovered they had a fugitive on their hands.

  By this point I could not keep my eyes open. My limbs were lead weights. My heart was hardly beating. I had, remember, siphoned a large proportion of my own blood out of my body and filled myself with thin blood, normal blood. In a few weeks my own blood would regenerate, but for now I was a wreck. A pale-skinned shadow of my former self.

  Whereas Jimmi had been given a new lease of life from the infusion of my augmented blood into his system. It gave him strength and vigour, it banished his pain, it made him feel as if he were sixteen again!

  But augmented blood isn’t the same as rejuve. It can restore and energise; but it can’t, if you don’t have the genes that I have, heal broken limbs and internal bleeding and ruptured organs. It can’t work miracles. Jimmi had suffered a series of appalling injuries at the hands of his torturers. All the transfusion had done was give him back his youth and health for one brief night.

  So that he could dance, and feel the joy of being alive in the arms of a girl, and bask in moonlight as music played, before he died.

  And all this he did. He died in joy.

  And his death was – it was all my fault.

  And now I had been captured. I would have no more opportunities to take revenge. If I wasn’t judicially murdered on the way to the courthouse, I was guaranteed a death sentence that would be enforced within the hour. It was all over for me.

  But I didn’t care. I knew th
at I would do it all again. I was happy to have traded my life to give Jimmi one last night of bliss.

  Joy, Jimmi, joy!

  Chapter 4

  My Name Is Artemis McIvor

  My name is Artemis McIvor and my dad was a librarian. But you already know all that. And my mother abandoned me when I was a child. But I MUST have mentioned that by now, because I’m obsessed with it.

  And I’ve been sentenced to death for recidivistic mass murder. I have only one more week to live.

  The cell I’m in1 is actually quite comfortable. It is more like a hotel room than a prison cage. Hidden cameras monitor my every move, but I have nothing to hide. The cell is en suite, there’s a shower, and a music player and a TV. I use none of them. I want to die smelly and rank, with my mind clear of distracting thoughts.

  I thought I would feel content, after completing so many of my long-awaited acts of revenge. But instead I just felt a dull throb of hate.

  My aim, as I’ve explained, or maybe I didn’t but I think it’s pretty fucking obvious, was to humiliate Daxox by killing his fellow perverts one by one. So that he would endure a living hell before his own, ghastly, demise.

  I’d envisaged in detail, in a multiplicity of scenarios, that glorious final act of vengeance. And of course, when I broke into his club that time I wasn’t going to kill him. I just wanted to let him know that I could. I would have tasered the two of them, him and Lowman, with a high energy bolt in the bowels. And left them to wake up in their own vomit and shit. So that for weeks afterwards Daxox would wake up every morning sweating with fear. And when Lowman’s head unexpectedly blew up – my shocking coup de théâtre! – Daxox would have feared with every atom of his being that—

  But it didn’t happen that way. All my plans had fallen to pieces. Well okay, Baron Lowman had been dealt with, admittedly, and the head blowing up thing was pretty cool. But there were seven more names on my list who I hadn’t got around to. All of them evil. All of them not-dead. And Daxox himself was safe.

  I should have abandoned Jimmi to his sad and lonely death, and gone for Daxox. That would have been the smart thing to do.

  But I didn’t. I followed my heart. I made myself vulnerable for Jimmi’s sake, to give him that one last night of joy. And as a result, Daxox was still alive.

  Alive. And smug. And—

  Leave it Artemis. Don’t waste your last hours hating a mollyfocker like that.

  My guess is the evil bastard will buy my cadaver from the prison service and keep it as a memento. Freeze dry it, and put it on a plinth maybe. Or—

  Fuck! How could I have been so—

  I know one thousand books by heart, and I can read them in my memory, as if off a screen. I don’t use a brain chip or a remote computer. It’s pure memory.

  I’m currently reading Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.2 It’s an old book written many centuries ago. The language is strange but I love it. As well as writing novels, Fielding helped create London’s first police force with his brother John, a blind magistrate. I love that period in history. The novel is rambling, what some call picaresque, which suits my mood, because my thoughts keep hopping around.

  My dad had an eidetic memory, and so do I. And he trained me in the art of remembering. I spent years as a child memorising facts and languages. I can speak Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, German and Russian, even though I live in a universe where everyone speaks English, apart from the French, whose ships continue to send mayday messages in a language no one (apart from me) can understand.3

  I can actually run around the entire room! Seriously! It works like this:

  First, I take a flying jump on the wall. Then I hit it with both feet and start running. If I’m fast enough, which I am, I can run up to the ceiling. Then because my bare feet have an adhesive factor I can also run from one end of the ceiling to the other then down the other wall. And round again.

  I’m like a hamster in a wheel.

  I’ve learned another trick. Sleeping.

  I slept twenty-three hours last night. I woke up as stiff as a board, but I could still remember many of my dreams. I dreamed I was a faun in a forest, killed by an arrow. But the arrow was a sword. Or maybe a penis with a metal tip. I only had three legs and I limped to the lake and lapped the waters and they were cold and luscious. My father was there, in his pyjamas, I don’t know why. Daxox was on the ground, throat slit, his head resting in a pool of his own blood, dead. I liked that bit. Daxox was dead.

  Dear Diary, my last-minute appeal has been refused.4

  I die tomorrow. I have one more book which I hope to finish reading in my head, then it’s all over for me. It’s Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. You’d love it. It’s the craziest book anyone has ever written. I’ll just start on Chapter One: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me…

  No! Too late. They’re opening the door. The bastards are early! And it’s my time to die.

  No matter. I’ve read that book a dozen times. I know how it comes out.

  In a moment, I decide, I’m going to escape.

  I’m being led down a corridor. I have magnetic shackles on my legs, hobbling me. There’s a doppelgänger robot either side of me. I’m nearly naked, just bra and panties, which isn’t erotic because I smell like a festering potato. But it means I have no way of concealing weapons about my person. I have no friends on the outside. But I decide to—

  Okay, some stuff you should know here, to understand what happens next:

  First, the leg shackles I’m wearing are controlled by ultrasound bursts emitted from a DR’s brain. The code for this is stored in Magog, the Cúchulainn remote computer. And as I said before, I can hack into that with my Rebus chip. My handcuffs, however, are manual-lock operated. And the two DRs who are escorting me are each seven foot tall and instead of arms they have clubs with blades.

  Got that? Here goes:

  The shackles fall off my legs, as I order Magog to let me free. There’s a clang; the DRs do not notice.

  I leap on the first DR, still with my hands cuffed, and use the manacles to wrench its head off its body.

  The metal of its body feels cold against my bare legs and arms. My heart is pounding, I’m in berserker mode, and I am making time slow down for me. The DR’s head slowly topples off its torso, like a cliff collapsing, and it falls to the ground and bounces, once, twice, then stops. Its dead face leers up at me.

  The second DR swings its club-arm-with-blades at me and I dodge and its arm hits the wall and breaks through and gets stuck.

  I am suddenly convinced that there is someone coming down the corridor to kill me. Dozens of soldiers are on their way – hundreds even! – armed with fast-fire rifles and shoulder-cannons. I stand no chance I—

  I ignore this fear, it is not helping me.

  Instead, I grab the DR’s head with both hands and twist and its neck joint breaks, severing the neural link to its limbs.

  “Fuck you,” says the DR, in a slow robotic voice.

  And then I am running. I stop slowing down time and it feels as if I’m running faster than light itself. I am fast, I am fearless, nothing can stop me! Ecstasy of battle consumes me, as I hurtle down the corridor and—

  The doors slam shut in front of me. Manually operated. I can’t control them.

  I turn around. The door at the far end of the corridor also slams shut, with a resounding clang.

  I walk back to my cell, sit on the bunk, and finish Chapter One of Tristram Shandy. When they come for me again they knock me out with a gas bomb. When I wake up I’m in the death machine.

  Capital punishment is now illegal on 70 per cent of SNG-controlled planets.5

  Not this one.

  The death machine is a pulping device. My head is between two metal plates. The plates will move together very fast, crushing both my skull and brain and also my memory chips. My body will then be crushed in similar fa
shion. Blood and entrails and smeared body parts will then be sluiced into a container and compacted. Nothing human can survive this.

  I have a itch. Fuck. On my left buttock. A conciliator is asking me if I want to repent on camera before my demise. I do not. All I want to do is to scratch my arse.

  I access Magog. I learn it has no control over the death machine, which is pretty much what I expected. It’s a steampunky Corporation device, created by some evil nerd, and operated by means of compressed air. The Court-appointed executioner will press the button that makes it – do what it does. I learn, from Magog, that the executioner’s name is Malcolm Bawles. He used to be a shop-keeper but his family were murdered by Clan gangsters. Now he’s a police officer and sometime executioner. He is a friend, I discover, of a bartender called Billy Rae, who used to be a friend of mine.

  Small world, huh?

  They’re fucking with me. I’ve been strapped to this machine for forty minutes. I should be dead by now. They’re just prolonging the agony.

  There’s a moment, just before you die, when everything becomes clear and focused. All uncertainty vanishes. The truth of the universe becomes manifest.

  And that moment came to me!

  And then it passed by swiftly, and I reverted to my usual state of bewildered confusion.

  Fuck.

  However, soon afterwards, my shackles were released. And a soft robot voice spoke to me:

  “You are free to go.”

  Well, I hadn’t been expecting that.

  “My name,” said the man, “since you ask so verrra nicely, is Brigadier Fraser.”

  Fraser had a very large nose – had he never heard of prosthetic surgery, the imbecile? And he wore old-fashioned eyeglasses of a kind you rarely see these days. His hair was grey, his face was wrinkled. All very old school. He also had a speech impediment of some kind – but no! I checked my database for referents – it was merely a Scottish accent.