Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Jason Werbeloff

  “I see it in your eyes, hun.”

  Daniel swung his gaze to the Beehive. Layers of base did nothing to conceal her wrinkled mouth.

  “The hunger,” she continued. “All us Bubblers have it. It’s natural. Don’t fight it. The hunger to hurt.”

  She watched Daniel a moment. “If privacy is what you need, you can switch the window to opaque. But this customer – he likes others to watch. Even leaves the door unlocked sometimes. See, the green light is on. Fingers and hands are his thing.”

  Lincoln swung the ax again. Even with the girl’s self-sealing arteries, a jet of blood sprayed his grinning cheeks. Daniel stared at the amputated elbow. At the shiny tip of bone poking through the now diminishing crimson flow in the girl’s upper arm. He could almost feel the sensation in his own elbow. A tingle. An itch. He licked his lips.

  The Beehive led Daniel by the hand back to the tank. “He’s all yours if you want him.”

  The boy floated, suspended in the minty liquid. Eyes shut, his face reposed almost peacefully. He might be dreaming. Daniel’s gaze traced the scars that ran down his arms. The fresher, equally-spaced cuts across his chest. The Beehive’s voice echoed in his head. ‘We charge extra for the barbed wire.’

  Daniel glanced back as blood spattered in a perfect arc across the glass of Lincoln’s cubicle. And then his eye drifted further, to the procession of viewing cubicles that stretched endlessly ahead along the corridor. The thought of all the blood spilt, the slashes, the amputations that were happening right now on the other side of those glass partitions …

  “Oh, hi John.” The Beehive turned to leech after a new customer. She winked at Daniel. “Just press the “Go” button. Give it a try,” she said, and fluttered down the corridor. “I’ve got a bleeder for you,” she shouted after the patron. “Arteries only semi-sealed …” Her voice trailed away as she disappeared into the murky depths of the club.

  Daniel’s left eye watered. He glared, unblinking at the green light on the door. The door to Lincoln’s cubicle. Daniel’s fisted fingernails bit into his palms. His knee was behind that door. And Lincoln’s fingers for Margaret. Once the android had its fingers, Daniel would have his cornea too.

  He peered through the glass. Lincoln had hacked off the girl’s right arm in methodical stages. Fingers. Wrist. Elbow. Shoulder. The parts lay helter-skelter on the bloody floor.

  Now the stockbroker stalked to the other side of the bed. Juggled the ax from hand to hand.

  Electricity surged through Daniel. His fingertips throbbed. His jaw clenched. Rage thundered in his heart. In his swollen fists. Every cell in him coursed with it.

  And then, as quickly as the rage had sprung, a tingled, mechanical calm settled over him. It unfurled his hands. Made him reach for the door handle.

  He stepped into the cubicle.

  A surge of iron-laden humidity bathed Daniel’s cheeks.

  Under the lazy revolutions of an unsuccessful ceiling fan, Lincoln poured his gaze over the child on the table. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he asked, not bothering to look who’d entered.

  Now that Daniel was standing on the other side of the glass, he could see the child’s face more clearly. Silky tears coursed down her bloodless cheeks, mingling with the blood on the table. Her elfin countenance was pulled into a practiced rigor mortis. How many times had she endured this? Stitches encircled her shoulders. Knees. Ankles. How many times had her limbs been hacked off, scrubbed, and replaced? Only to be hacked off again.

  Lincoln wiped a hand on his pants. Blood trickled down the smart fabric of his mandarin shirt. Dripped on the floor. “Joining or watching?” he asked.

  Daniel locked the door with a satisfying click. “I’ll join.” His finger found the opacity switch for the glass wall, and set it to private.

  The floor shuddered, vibrating up Daniel’s legs. Lincoln had let the ax drop to the concrete. “Fetch me the saw,” he said through a blood-speckled grin. He gestured to the cupboard off to one side of the room. “The ax is too quick.”

  Time slowed as Daniel padded to the rusted metal cabinet. The hum of the dulled fluorescent oozed through the webbing of his fingers. The thwop … thwop … thwop of the ceiling fan regulated his heart. His hand. Steady. Steady as he reached into the rusted metal cabinet. He paused at the handle of the saw, and moved on. His fingers found the machete instead. A long, gleaming sheath of stainless steel. Wooden handle. Coarse against his flesh. Heavy.

  “It’s the color of her skin that I love,” said Lincoln, still staring at the girl on the table. He leaned over her, his eyes directly above hers. “So pale.”

  Daniel moved to the bed. The hairline cracks in the rubber soles of his loafers squeaked on the bloody floor.

  He stood behind the middle-aged stockbroker. Daniel’s eyes swam over Lincoln’s neck – hair pasted against the tanned, ochre skin. Down the man’s muscled back. Over Lincoln’s buttocks. Down to the cleft of the man’s left knee.

  Daniel raised the machete. He was about to swing it down, when the handle seemed to come alive in his hand. Juddered painfully in his grip.

  At the same time, a metallic clang pierced the room. Daniel and Lincoln looked up.

  The machete had clipped the swinging blades of the ceiling fan.

  Lincoln spun around at the noise. “What in the hell do you think –”

  Every ounce of calm, every touch of confidence, evaporated from the room. Adrenaline flooded Daniel’s heart. His hands. His cock. The dim light of the cubicle brightened. Details sprung out at him. The chewed corner of the mattress where the girl lay. The exposed artery dripping from her shoulder. The shock in Lincoln’s leathery cheeks.

  Daniel caught his suddenly rapid breath.

  He swung the machete, but Lincoln had stepped inside the arc of the blade. Daniel’s elbow connected with the man’s ear, and the recoil forced the hilt from his grasp. It fell to the ground and bounded to the far corner of the room.

  Stunned from the impact to his temple, Lincoln stumbled backward. Braced himself with bloody hands against the girl’s leg. Time had become an endless syrupy haze of shock. Daniel watched, fascinated, as the man’s fingers depressed the flesh of her thigh.

  Daniel blinked.

  The ax. It lay between him and Lincoln. Waiting.

  This was it, thought Daniel. He had no choice.

  He wanted to live.

  The clarity of that thought galvanized him. Its edges were so distinct. Life or death. There was no middle ground in the dim, bloody chamber at Amputating Amy. Only one man was walking out of this room alive. Daniel wanted, Gods how much he wanted, that man to be him.

  He dived to the ground. Ignored the crack of his hip on the concrete. Ignored the burn in his elbow as it grated against the unforgiving floor.

  While Daniel grappled for the handle with outstretched fingers, Lincoln’s eyes seem to focus. With an elegant acceleration Daniel’s plundered body could never match, the squash player sprung to life, and rushed his younger opponent.

  “I’ll kill you,” hissed Lincoln. He snatched a clump of Daniel’s hair just as the boy’s grip closed around the handle of the ax. “Do you know who I am?” the man screamed, and smashed Daniel’s chin into the floor.

  Molten iron glazed his skull. Burrowed under his eyes. Seethed through the folds of his brain.

  The world split in two, then interlaced, just as Lincoln lifted Daniel’s head to smash it into the concrete a second time.

  Daniel snapped his weight to one side. Yanked his hair from the older man’s grip. He twisted, ignoring the way the world lurched and shivered when he broke away from Lincoln’s grasp. He gritted his teeth. Lifted the ax from the floor, and with everything in him, swung it down on Lincoln’s torso.

  A wave of something hot and tangy spattered across his face. When he opened his eyes, when the earth stood still under his feet and his eyes discerned just one image, he saw Lincoln stumbling backward. The blade of the ax was buried in the man’s stomach.

 
Horror crept over Lincoln’s face like an unexpected mist on a warm evening. “I didn’t … do you know … know who I am?”

  Daniel tugged the ax from Lincoln’s wound, and a fresh arterial spray caressed Daniel’s cheek.

  Daniel stood to his full height. He couldn’t feel the blood from his split chin running down his neck. He couldn’t feel the throbbing in his skull. The twinge in his knee. He couldn’t feel anything at all as he swung the ax again.

  And again.

  Until Lincoln was silent.

  He stood there a moment. Leaned against the steel table to catch his breath. A film of sweat covered the girl’s closed eyelids. She seemed to have fallen asleep.

  Daniel returned his attention to the body on the floor. Lifted the ax again. And began his work.

  The blade was composed of A-grade steel according to the handle. And the burnished face of the steel hinted at its recent sharpening. But Daniel was amazed at how difficult it was to remove a knee.

  He thought one chop of the ax would split the lower leg. Maybe two chops. But as Daniel brought down the ax for a seventh time on Lincoln’s tibia, he speculated whether the man might have a reinforced skeleton – Geppetto had offered nanite injections that did just that. Or maybe all that time on the squash courts had strengthened Lincoln’s bones. Either way, Daniel was exhausted by the time he’d removed just the lower half of the leg.

  Daniel explored the cupboard. Ah, a bone saw. Much, much better. The right tools made anything possible. The femur separated from the knee ten minutes later. Axes might look impressive, but they weren’t exactly efficient.

  Unlike the girl on the table, who was sleeping soundly, Lincoln didn’t have self-sealing arteries. He’d lost consciousness early on in his dismemberment. Still twitched for a good twenty minutes into the procedure. Humans, it seemed, were resilient creatures. Or, at least, Lincoln Russell was.

  Daniel unbuttoned the man’s mandarin smart shirt, and disrobed him. The moment the fabric lost contact with the dead man’s body, it reverted to its default white.

  He wrapped the knee in the shirt, and slung it over his shoulder. Useful. Smart fabric was waterproof. Not a spot of blood showed through the material.

  He was about to leave, when … the fingers. Godsdammit, he’d forgotten the fingers Margaret had demanded.

  He sighed, and lifted the bone saw again. How many had Margaret wanted? Two? Four? And which fingers had the android been missing? He tried to remember the machine’s hands on the Formica tabletop. The way they’d tapped the surface while the android talked.

  Fuckit, he thought, and sawed off all ten along their knuckles. Margaret could have all of them if it wanted. Hells, its fingers looked damned ugly as they were – being an assortment from various donors. Might do Margaret’s confidence some good to have them all in one hue.

  He wrapped the ten fingers in the shirt, together with the knee.

  Did androids experience confidence? He wasn’t too sure what the machine’s motivations were, if a machine could be motivated by anything other than a programmed command. Maybe he’d ask.

  Daniel inspected himself in the reflection of the opaque glass window. He wasn’t exactly presentable – what with the streaks of dried blood across his face.

  His heart leapt.

  Blood!

  He’d been entirely focused on dismembering Lincoln. Hadn’t given a thought to the myriad traces of himself he’d left in the room. And the body. What in Gods’ names was he going to do with the body?

  The reflection of Daniel in the glass raised its fingers to inspect the gash on its chin. Between jagged edged skin, the finger touched bone. Smooth and sharp. He didn’t allow himself time to enjoy the feeling.

  He had work to do.

  He returned to the cupboard. Weapons of every description. A first aid kit. But no mop or bucket. Nothing he could see that could be used to clean up. What was it with Bubblers? Thomsin’s apartment didn’t have a mop either.

  He steadied his shaking hands. Inhaled. Again.

  Think, Daniel.

  The room was about twelve by nine feet. Bed in the center of it, with the sleeping girl. The walls all appeared solid, other than the glass behind him. But there, in the corner of the room, the concrete floor was a mismatched hue.

  He was about to inspect the silvery patch, when a sudden dingggg punctured his thoughts, and a chirpy jingle filled the room. “Two minutes remaining,” said the voice from everywhere at once. “Kindly swipe credit card to continue using facility.” A paypoint glowed beside the door.

  Daniel reached for his card, but stopped himself. That was Thomsin’s card. If he swiped it, there’d be a direct trace back to the apartment. No, he needed that apartment.

  Lincoln.

  He hurried to the body. Reached into the man’s right pants pocket. There was something odd about calling them pants at all, now that the man was missing a leg. Was a pair of pants still pants (plural) without one of its legs? Was it a ‘pair’ at all?

  “One minute remaining. Swipe card to continue using facility.”

  He fished out Lincoln’s wallet, and fumbled around inside. Cards … cards … Ah. Raised numbering, with the same appearance as Thomsin’s card. Different color, but that looked like a credit card.

  He darted to the paypoint on the wall, pulsing red now.

  “Thirty seconds. Swipe card to – thank you. One hour remaining.”

  Daniel sighed. Rose unsteadily to his feet. This killing business was hard work. He lumbered over to the patched floor in the corner. He’d do it better next time. Plan it. Like the perps did on Law and Order. The perps who got away with it, that is.

  The discolored patch of floor yielded slightly as he stepped onto it. He bent down. Tapped it with his knuckles. Hollow. Metallic. He examined the floor more closely. No seams in the metal. No way to open it. His finger could barely trace the transition from the surrounding concrete to the metal plate.

  Would it be that serious if they found his DNA here? He glanced at the sprays of blood across the gray walls. There must be blood from dozens of donors in this room. Maybe hundreds. Sure, they’d find his. But not just his. Maybe he should leave now.

  That’s when his eye happened upon the round, glowing button on the wall above the panel. Gods, Daniel.

  He pressed it, and the metal plate slid down and aside. A hole, a yard square, yawned in the floor where the plate had been. Cool, fetid air washed over his eyeballs as he stared through the black hole. The distant sound of dripping water echoed in the folds of Daniel’s ear.

  He dragged Lincoln’s body to the side of the hole, and shooed it through the gap in the floor. “Looks like your stocks are about to drop,” said Daniel. He heard a soft squelch below. And then, silence.

  But now he saw that the plate hadn’t only revealed a hole. To one side, partly recessed under the floor, was a polycarbonate box.

  He pulled it aside. Lifted it above ground, and unlatched its hinges. Oh thank Gods. Spray bottles. A collapsed mop. A bucket.

  Daniel got to work.

  Talking in Tongues

  Kage was halfway out the taxi before it had completed its descent.

  “Shit,” he muttered, remembering the pile of clothes he’d left behind on the seat. Every item of clothing he owned. He scooped them up under his arm, and hopped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Thank you for using Heli–” But Kage was already out of earshot before the cab could say goodbye. He was dressed and ready. He’d set his glasses to full sleuth mode – the custom app he’d designed to record and analyze crime scenes ran in the background. But he didn’t quite know what to do with the bundle of clothes under his arm.

  Investigative policing, or at least the sort of investigating Kage did, was an elegant business. Scouring a crime scene for that crucial piece of fabric left behind by the killer, that stray strand of DNA, that lost pubic hair – Kage adored the finesse of his job.

  The sort of finesse made impossible by a bundle of dirty c
lothing tucked under his armpit.

  He glanced up and down the deserted alley. Police strobe lights threw billions of red-blue pairs of husky dancers across the cracked walls. Along the cobbled ground. They drove away the Promenade’s inhabitants.

  With its locale on the northern border of the Bubble, the Promenade was perhaps the seediest area this side of the glowing forcefield. Politicians and housewives alike bemoaned the resemblance of the Promenade’s darkest alleys to the Gutter. Opposition politicians and religious leaders pointed quivering fingers to the underground clubs that spawned with the resilience of a stubborn cancer.

  A club like the one he stood before now. Amputating Amy.

  He’d heard about it before, but brought up details on his glasses by staring at the hovering sign in the doorway.

  Gore bar. Thirty rooms. Big operation. Not quite a decade old. Licensed for amputations, but not killings. Not legally, anyway. Killings happened only at killing bars. Or so the law dictated. Killing bars were expensive. Limited licenses were handed out over the Bubble’s thick red tape. Gore bars had soared in popularity as a result.

  But as popular as it was, the police blinkers had driven any potential customers away from Amputating Amy’s tonight. Seemed safe enough to leave his pile of clothes just outside the door.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here.” The woman had a beehive piled so high it barely cleared the ceiling. Purple hair.

  A patrolman caught up with her.

  “ID?” he asked, looking at Kage.

  “It’s me, Harry.” Kage handed over his polycarbonate PI license.

  The patrolman tilted his head. Narrowed his eyes.

  “Oh! Kass – I mean, sorry. Kage. Sorry ‘bout that. Right this way.”

  “I’ve been waiting more than an hour for the detectives to arrive. When you think you people’ll be done? I’ve got a business to run. You pigs are scaring away the customers.”

  The patrolman placed a hand on Kage’s back to guide him away from the Beehive. The way a man would protect a woman from a threat, thought Kage. Condescending. Protective. He hated that the touch felt so good between his shoulder blades.