Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  There were men who would lean into their monitors with smiles on their faces, crawling desire in their guts, to see that very woman lying with her skirt hitched up and the hose torn away and her throat gaping as wide as her amphibious mouth. There were men who would not only want to see it, but want to perform it. This megalopolis was filled with such men. One could populate a lesser city entirely with them alone. They didn’t see the woman as a living, breathing person like themselves. She was as good as a comp construct to them, or an android, a character in a vidgame. They were ravenous boys – whatever their age – who wanted to break things and glut themselves and wait for more and more stimulation to come along and relieve them of the boredom and pointlessness that defined their existence. They were sharks; all teeth, no souls. In Punktown, maybe the only souls in residence were those one downloaded into one’s flat, temporary souls that lasted mere hours instead for eternity.

  The tiniest, barest of clicks inside him. Lawr set his cup on a little shelf, turned to the keyboard and punched in the number with his mummified finger.

  The seal for the Paxton Police Force filled the scratched, partially graffiti-obscured vidscreen, but that was all. A young woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Paxton Police Force tip hotline – your anonymity is assured. How can we help you?”

  “Um, yeah, I’m a student attending P.U., and I’m doing my psychology thesis on the subject of incest. In the course of my research on the net I encountered a site called...Incestykes.”

  “Yes?”

  Lawr cleared his throat, glanced nervously outside as if afraid black-helmeted forcers would surround the booth at any moment. It was beginning to rain. Suffocating gray towers sought to wall up the sky alive, leaving only white chinks showing through.

  He fretted about the girl lying alone in his flat – feeling weirdly guilty, as if he had left a sick child unattended. At least he had his palm comp in his pocket, and on its screen he could monitor the girl distantly. Before he had left home he had swiveled his system’s main monitor to face toward the bed, its vidphone feature open for transmission, but only to his portable unit. Or so he hoped – it would be more than unfortunate if someone intentionally or unintentionally intercepted the open signal, but it was a risk he had decided to take. He had stolen a few peeks at her on his way here, but he wasn’t willing to chance a peek now no matter how much he itched to do so, still not trusting that the forcers weren’t observing him surreptitiously from behind their innocuous gold seal.

  He briefly described encountering the image of the child, clicking on it, and being startled to find a hologram delivered into his flat. He related that he had been disturbed by the girl’s youth and state of undress, disgusted that she was being used for such a purpose, and that his disgust had turned to horror when the recording progressed through several phases, the third of which clearly indicated the model had been seriously abused.

  He went on to report his outraged message to the owners of Incestykes, and the response he had received. As he talked about all this, he found he didn’t have to fake the emotion in his voice; the lies had ended with his initial talk of research. He sounded angry, desperately concerned. He no longer stammered, but raged rapidly and loudly.

  “They talk like they don’t know who sends them this stuff,” he ranted, “but they have to know who they’re paying for it, don’t they? They have to have some kind of contact info. They could find out the names and addresses of these people if they wanted to.”

  “But they don’t want to,” the policewoman told him patiently, her voice much more composed than his own. “Anyway, the individuals who supply material like this to these sites usually do so through fake names and addresses, security buffers like that, just in case the site gets shut down and someone comes trying to trace them. It’s hard to track them down, because they change these names, addresses and the bank accounts they use all the time. Sometimes they only sell one vid or series of stills and you never see anything from that source again. Yes, the sites themselves are out to make money, but the people who supply these images often don’t make that much – they just want to share what they have. It increases the thrill for them for other people to see it.”

  “But when someone like me makes you aware of some particular content you come down on the site, don’t you?”

  “Well, since you’re making this report we have to look into it, but the site owners will simply claim ignorance. How do they know the model is really below the age of consent, they’ll say. How do they know the wounds you saw weren’t just makeup or a comp effect? How do they know the girl isn’t a comp construct entirely? We can cross-check the girl against files of missing and endangered children, but if no matches come up it will probably end there. Yes, the recording can be analyzed by tech experts to determine that the girl isn’t a construct, and forensic experts to determine if her wounds are authentic...the site owners could be arrested and brought in for truth scans, and there can be a warrant to seize their equipment, to insure that they truly don’t know the source of this recording...but to be honest it usually doesn’t go that far. There’s too much of this material out there, sir. Our police force is just too overtaxed to pursue criminals through the back alleys of the net. We have tangible dead bodies lying at our feet every day. This is Punktown, sir.”

  “So it is,” Lawr muttered, almost hyperventilating though he had ceased his raging. What good was it to rage to a blank screen? “So it is.”

  * * *

  Walking back toward the entrance to the underground, ducking his neck into his collar against the rain, Lawr felt his fury for the people who had made the recording revert to disgust with himself. Faceless abusers, faceless net site owners, faceless law enforcers; in the end, the only face he could confront over this was his own. He didn’t know whether the intrusion of the imp into his life had pointed out the worst in him, or the best in him, or something of both.

  As he walked, he slipped his palm comp out of his pocket, flipped it open and thumbed on the remote monitoring feature. When he saw that the girl was no longer in his bed he stopped dead in his tracks, and a woman behind him cursed as she had to quickly divert her course around him. In his dismay, he was unmindful of his fellow pedestrians, didn’t care that they might glance at his little screen.

  It took only a moment to spot where she had shifted to.

  Fourth phase, the tech support at Incestykes had said.

  Only her legs showed at the bottom of the frame, bare skeletal legs that slowly stretched out and were drawn in again one at a time, as if she were exercising on her back on the floor. Had she been a physical entity, her heels would be carving grooves in the carpet right now. They were weak, languorous movements. What was happening to the rest of her body out of frame? Was the last of her breath being strangled out of her? Or was her body giving out on its own, these the weary death throes that followed a prolonged suffering, observed dispassionately by the camera and the man or men behind it?

  “Oh God,” Lawr moaned, and he resumed walking, more briskly now. The palm comp remained open in his hand, and he almost dropped it a couple times when he jostled other people also heading for the subway. The escalators were too slow; he hastened down several sets of steps to the platform he needed to return to his neighborhood. When he saw that his tube had already pulled into the station he broke into a run to reach it, and cut off several other people waiting to board as he lunged inside. This time he found a seat, didn’t have to stand, and he cupped the palm comp in both hands and watched it intently as the tube’s doors shut and it started into motion.

  Sometimes her legs would go still, and his heart would hang suspended as he expected her suffering to have ended, but then one leg would draw up again. Stretch out straight again. Followed by the other leg.

  “Hold on,” he whispered to her. “Please...”

  * * *

  Lawr burst into his apartment as if to save a child from a fire, but he was brought up short just one step over the thres
hold.

  He had dreaded seeing her, lying on her back on the carpet beside his bed, as if she had rolled off and fallen there in her death throes. Would her eyes be turned up to him, locked on his as they had been during the first two phases? And if so, would they be the seeing eyes of the living, or the blank stare of the dead? How much more terribly wasted, wounded, would she appear? He had tried to steel himself for it, and now the released tension nearly made him gag – though not in revulsion, as it turned out. What he saw was more horrible to him than her disfigured, dying or dead visage.

  She was gone. Vanished. For a moment, he looked wildly around him. Where in his tiny flat with its combination living room/bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom could she be hiding now? Seated on his toilet, maybe? But then he remembered...

  “The program will end on its own after its fourth phase,” the tech support had said.

  “God. Oh God,” he whispered, his body sagging. He gazed numbly at the place where she had lain. Not a fiber of the mossy green carpet was stained with her blood or sweat or urine, or crushed down except where he had trod them himself.

  He looked up sharply toward his comp system, on a sudden impulse rushed to it and fell into his chair. Quick, nervous fingers brought up the site for Incestykes. The menu of samples...

  There she was, restored to the screen: a girl with wispy blond hair and a sweet smile, shown bare to the tiny dots of her nipples, so delicate she was almost frail, and filmed in a weird greenish light. His imp. His ghost. His angel.

  This time, as the support tech had pointed out, he noted the tiny icon in the lower left corner that would have indicated to him she was an interactive imp. He moved his cursor over the girl’s chest.

  He had been with her throughout most of her ordeal, or as much of it as her tormentors had decided to share. Lawr felt he owed it to her to see her through the very end of it, so that in some way it wouldn’t be like she had died alone except for the presence of her murderers. He would bring her back, his little roommate, his mute companion – resurrect her from the dead yet again.

  His cursor hovered there, like a Ouija board’s pointing planchette. But slowly he withdrew his hand.

  Tears broke free as Lawr locked eyes with the still image on the screen.

  “I’m sorry,” he sobbed to her, not really sure why he should be apologizing. But who else was there to apologize to her? “I’m so sorry.”

  Then he shut his comp system off entirely.

  The Room

  There are two posters on my living room wall. They might seem a little juvenile, clashing with the rest of my Beaumonde Street luxury apartment, but I told the decorator I hired to just frame them nice and never mind the wrinkly-nosed comments. The posters are photos of the music stars Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia, the acid-tongued Frankie being a long-standing critical darling and Del, of course, being the working class hero of the whole damn Earth Colonies, both of them noted as powerful songwriters. I’d always liked Kahn, but it wasn’t until I met Candida that I really came to appreciate both men’s music.

  Nowadays a lot of people call me Wild Bill. The story behind that is, four triggers of a rival syndy once tried to gun down Neptune Teeb at a birthday party for the daughter of one of his captains. The way they tell it, one of Teeb’s rising young slicks, known for his quickness – yours truly – brought down two of those stupid mad-dogs himself with his .55 Scythe. Now, of course I can’t confirm that tale. It’s enough that I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you. And that’s something that happened twenty years ago, when I was a kid of twenty-four. Well, that’s when it began, anyway.

  Back in those days I was known as Quick Billy. That was because people would tell you things like, “Billy can get that for you right away,” and, “Nobody can get such-and-such for you faster than Billy.” I’d also like to think it was a nod to my smarts, because there are definitely dumber people in my profession (like triggers who crash a party full of syndy boys carrying friends under their tailor-made suits).

  I started out as a gang punk, and who didn’t when you lived in a neighborhood like Forma Street? But my quickness of thought and action soon got me noticed and adopted into the Teeb family. To this day Neptune Teeb, despite numerous attempts to take him down, remains the strongest syndy boss in the city of Punktown; on the whole of the planet Oasis, for that matter. To be number one, of course Teeb has to have his hand in all the usual iniquities – drugs, girls, gambling – but he has a certain flair for the black market. And naturally, the black market consists most importantly of guns, but Teeb also has a whole stable of people talented in biotech and other such scientific wizardry. That’s how they attract their higher-end clientele. If you can afford it, they can get you an android made that looks like your favorite VT star. If you die, they can clone you in one of their secret clinics, where your cells have been kept in storage in the event of just such a calamity, and load it up with a recording of your memory, all this despite cloning of private citizens being illegal.

  I knew a lot of people, I had real street rapport, and so Candida got my name from some friend of a friend at school. School was none other than Paxton Polytech (Paxton being Punktown’s real name, but only the rich folks who send their kids to Paxton Polytech would call it that). Candida Jaxxon. I tried calling her Jax but she didn’t go for that. She didn’t go for calling me Quick Billy, either. For her, I was always William; she said it with a teasing smile, and it’s my favorite of the various names I’ve worn over the decades.

  For me, she became Candy.

  * * *

  I was given directions to her apartment building, a very nondescript little box hiding behind the frilly name Colonial Estates. She was on the top floor, six, and I rode the lift to a gloomy long tunnel of a hallway with a third of its strip lights out and another third fluttering. I counted off the numbers on the metal doors with their blistered beige paint, until I came to the one I’d been given: 30, the last door on the right side of the hallway.

  I rang the buzzer, and in moments the vid screen set into the door flickered to life and a woman’s face appeared before me. I knew she could see me, too. “Yes?” she asked, sounding wary.

  “Quick Billy.”

  I heard the bolts snap back on the other side of the metal door, and when it was hauled open I saw the woman wasn’t at my eye level as she had seemed on the security monitor. She was short but nicely proportioned, with long legs in tight jeans, and her shapeless Paxton Polytech sweatshirt couldn’t entirely hide the shapes within; mm-hm, two soft kids snuggled all warm under a cozy blanket. Her skin was a creamy chocolate, her lips extra full, her shoulder-length hair tied back behind her head. The way she tipped her head up to look at me, and the way her lips pouted, it was like she was thrusting them out at me just to see what I’d do. I found I couldn’t stop watching her mouth.

  She smiled, a little shy maybe, maybe a little afraid. Not that I was so scary looking – yeah, I had on my leather jacket but I thought my black beret made me look, you know, poetic, and I still had a baby face back then – but she knew I was a runner for a syndy, and I imagine she’d never had dealings with a creature such as me before. She said in a soft voice, “I hear you can get me some special items I need for a project I’m working on.”

  “What kind of project, if I might ask?”

  “I’m working on my thesis, and it involves some practical applications to support and demonstrate my research.”

  “Ahh, right. Anyway, do you have a list or something of what you’re looking for?”

  “Yeah, I’ve printed some things off the net to show you, and I have a couple magazines, too. Come in, please.” She stepped aside to let me into her little flat. It was dingy, a bit cluttered but clean enough. Right away I noticed the work station she’d made out of her living room. Against one wall was her desk, covered in expensive computer equipment, a large central screen surrounded by a number of smaller monitors and some virtual screens projected into the air, to boot. Thick
black cables snaked down the side of the desk into a power unit she’d adapted to the wall outlet. Did her landlord know about that? I bet utilities weren’t included in her rent.

  Turning, I nodded at two posters on another of the room’s walls. “Del Kahn. I like him. Who’s the other guy?”

  Candy looked up from where she was digging out that stuff to show me. “Frankie Dystopia. Amazing lyricist. You don’t know him?”

  “Maybe if I heard him he’d be familiar.”

  “Wait a second.” She moved to her music system, punched a few keys, and started up one of Dystopia’s first recordings, as I later learned. She flashed a smile at me, bright white against her dark skin, and motioned for me to sit on the sofa. She plunked down easily beside me – I guess she was losing the wariness – and spread her materials across our legs. “This is the thing I need the most. Not exactly something I can order out of a catalog.”

  “That where you got your other stuff?” I nodded at her busy technical set-up.