Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  But when she had stripped and lowered herself to the bed, smiling up at him with those too-wide eyes, he had found it difficult to maintain an erection. He didn’t know why this was. When the smiling girl offered him a pill to rectify the matter, he only became irritated and swept it out of her hand. When he did this her smile never faltered, but again recalling the girl in the elevator, he wondered if there might be secret workings underway in this entity’s mind. When had the girl he’d confronted decided to go rogue? How long had it taken, and what had she experienced – what had she learned – that had culminated in her decision? What made one robot act upon such an impulse, when another would never consider it? A different model brain? A glitch or virus in the system? Was it a kind of accident of evolution, as with biological life?

  In the end, he couldn’t look so directly into her eyes, and instead stood beside the bed holding her ankles and rubbing himself between the wrinkled soles of her pretty feet. This finally aroused him, but chafed him, and he finished off by ordering her to roll onto her front, climbing onto her back, and rubbing his sore cock in the crease between her soft, silicon buttocks.

  Skipping a shower, when he’d returned to the ground floor he sat in the lounge, drinking alone – snarling at any girl, or overly cheery customer, who tried to open conversation with him. Downing his Zubs, he watched that tiny, sweet-faced girl -- her sleek black hair plastered to her shoulders and her scrap of a top barely containing her oversized breasts -- as she splashed in the pool like a naiad. Despite his having satisfied his needs, she still inspired a vast hollow ache inside him that was terrible to experience and yet exhilarating, too. But when the girl caught him staring and grinned at him shyly, wiggling her fingers in a wave, he turned his gaze from her.

  Night had fallen when he returned to Subtown, and fortunately most of the rush hour traffic of workers returning home had ebbed. Making a swooping descent through one of the ramps that led down into the subterranean sector, several times Huck almost scraped the Albatross’ belly across the roofs of the hovercars crawling along closer to the ground. One mutant, or species of alien he had never encountered before, glared up at him through the bubble dome of his odd little vehicle. Huck laughed wildly and only sped forward more quickly, swerving in and out between other helicars.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled at the angry driver of another helicar, whom he had almost forced into the wall of the ramp’s tunnel. “You too!” he laughed at a hovercar’s driver, who was glancing up at the Albatross’ belly nervously. “Fuck you all!” Huck roared.

  Down in the streets of Subtown, now…the Kalian sector…along the length of Morpha Street B. At Forma Street’s B level, he encountered a sudden knot of choked traffic, and ascended higher above it with an abrupt surge. So abrupt, and such a surge, that he leveled off too late, and there was an ungodly screech as he scraped the top of his beautiful old Albatross against a low-hanging pipe affixed to the ceiling. He even saw a spray of sparks go bouncing off his windshield and hood. Shaken, Huck took the Albatross down fast (but not too fast), and alighted on the flat roof of a derelict warehouse.

  He stepped out of the helicar, thrust his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket (to hide their shaking from himself?), and walked to the edge of the roof. He felt nauseous, as if with vertigo, as he watched the bustling activity of the streets from this vantage point…feeling unaccountably conflicted, like a man contemplating throwing himself to his death.

  He felt cut free, but he didn’t feel free. He felt like he no longer had any purpose.

  Worse yet – he felt that he never had.

  HANAKO

  4

  Hanako did not go to work the next day, did not even call in sick. She sat on the sofa of her sterile apartment, staring unblinking at the orange, spiny little cactus that rested in the center of her otherwise empty coffee table. Though she knew it drew all the moisture it needed from the air, she still felt an odd impulse to water the cactus…to tend to it somehow.

  Sabina had been a nurse…had cared for countless people. If the people who’d killed her had been her patients back then, she would have cared for them as well. The concept of injustice, of unfairness, crystallized in Hanako’s mind just then, more so even than when she had suffered abuses as a pleasure machine. More so even than when she had made that first decision to escape.

  She hadn’t called work, but she had phoned the local police precinct house and asked for the Fekah detective. “Did you find out how she was murdered?” she’d asked him.

  “There were no signs of violence, so we can’t say yet that she was murdered. She had an artificial heart, and it seems to have malfunctioned.”

  “But there was a break-in – couldn’t her heart have given out from fear and stress?”

  “That’s possible – I’m not a physician. Or a mechanic.”

  The detective went on to report that it couldn’t be determined if money had been taken, since they had no idea what amount the woman might have had in her apartment. Maybe some objects of value had been stolen, but unless Hanako had noted any missing items then there was no real inventory of the woman’s belongings to reference. The Fekah reiterated that next of kin were still being sought, but Hanako felt that if there were any, surely some computer would have called up their names in seconds. What would become of all those plants, and the other belongings that had defined Sabina’s life? Would they simply be destroyed, to make room for Apartment 12’s next tenant?

  The detective insisted that the investigation was still underway. But even as he signed off, Hanako could hear a burst of gunfire in the distance, outside her windows. Another killing. Another morning in Punktown. She didn’t expect the investigation to be a top priority. There was no way of erasing this blotch of cosmic unfairness. There was no way of gaining real justice.

  Was there?

  After hours of sitting in the same position -- her apartment utterly silent, with not even the VT running for company -- Hanako arose stiffly, pivoted, and walked to the two windows at the far end of her living room. Like the corresponding windows of Sabina’s apartment, on the floor below, they faced onto the park locals had dubbed the Jungle. Hanako stood there a long while, her arms at her sides, eyes still unblinking because there was no one here to appear human for, her chest not rising and falling because she required no breath.

  What did she require, then?

  She required her friend. But her friend was gone.

  She watched, and watched, until she saw a rippling wave like a breeze, or a pair of stealthy tigers, passing through the elephant grass. At last two figures appeared from its border. Between them they dragged the beaten and barely struggling body of a shabby homeless man. They dumped him onto one of the park’s paths, then bent over him to perform some further mischief or other. Hanako saw him dig his heels at the cracked pavement in renewed agitation. Surely he had no money for them to find. This must simply be their daily routine. This was their life work.

  Hanako turned away from the window, and looked across the room at the little cactus again, which rested at the center of the large, too white, too empty room like an irritating grain of sand lodged inside an oyster. But such a piece of grit was the seed of a pearl.

  Had she had one upgrade too many? Was there a grain of sand in the workings of her mind?

  She had wished to live as a human. It had not been her goal – consciously at least – to become a human. What she was feeling…what she was contemplating…it made no kind of logical sense. This was the way humans behaved. It was irrational. It went against everything she had striven for. Order, comfort, anonymity. A quiet life of…of what?

  She wasn’t ready to consider the word love, but Sabina had taught her friendship. And thus, had also taught her loss.

  And those boys down there – they had taught her another kind of feeling altogether.

  Without a nod, a sigh, any outward sign that a decision had been reached, she padded across the room, fitted her feet into her shoes with their stil
etto heels, and then clicked across her too barren floor for the door to her apartment – as if to go to work.

  * * *

  She clicked down the sidewalk, alongside the tall fence, through which fronds and branches and long grass strained as if to reach for her, but no faces appeared at the bars to call out to her. She turned the corner, walked along the next street’s sidewalk until she came to one of the entrances to the park. She passed through a kind of archway in the fence, and continued clicking onto one of the park’s many labyrinthine paths.

  Right away, inside the park for the very first time, she was reminded of Sabina’s apartment. Life bloomed everywhere, life without constraint, exuberant and heady. She regretted that she could not smell it, but she had sensors in her hands and ran them through bundles of leaves she passed as they spilled at her like foamy ocean waves. Here and there, wildflowers spattered their colors through the chaos. It was all like one vast painting nearly overflowing its frame. Could the park have been any more beautiful in its early days, when its lawns had been closely trimmed, its hedges neatly shaped?

  Hanako stopped walking suddenly, having heard indistinct voices somewhere off the path. She waited for more, but didn’t catch anything. Bending, she removed her shoes and set them down in the shadows under a bush. Then, barefoot, she stepped off the pathway, parting the tall grass with her arms and slipping within…a first time swimmer, diving into the very heart of the dangerous but life-filled sea.

  Pressing on through the grass, which grew to almost twice her height here, she came to another species of plant life that arrested her attention, causing her to stop and study it. The elephant grass had given way to closely grown tubular stalks, tall as the grass. At the head of each stalk was a crown of fronds, but what fascinated her was that the tubes were transparent, and apparently filled with an amber-colored fluid or sap. And in this fluid floated tiny dead insects -- flies and beetles. She even spied a small bird wedged down in one of them. She looked up again at the fronds and deduced that there must be a hole in the center of each crown, at the mouth of the tubes. Insects, drawn to some sweet scent perhaps, alighted on the fronds, slipped down them into the holes and then down into the tubes, where they drowned and were digested in the ambery fluid. She smiled. Nature was more ingenious than the cleverest designer of mechanical life.

  A murmur of voices again. She turned toward it, and saw wisps of bluish smoke curling between the stalks that she would have smelled before had she been human. She moved toward the smoke, pushing between the glossy transparent tubes, and stepped into a large circular area that apparently the park’s inhabitants had cleared here. The ground in the clearing was blackened as if burnt.

  The clearing was strewn with candy wrappers and fast food cartons, crushed beer cans. At its center, as if around a campfire, sat three bare-chested young people, but what they sat around was some sort of hookah. Its body consisted of a clear globe containing bubbling fluid, in which floated a live jellyfish. Hanako wondered if it were an immature specimen of the extradimensional creature called a bender, which she had seen on VT, the poison of which was said to cause hallucinations and expand the consciousness – if it didn’t kill you first.

  All three sported a large, identical tattoo on their chests – a film loop of a man bound to a chair having his head cut off, except on one boy’s chest the film was stuck, juddering, with lines of static scored through it. The other male was a mutant afflicted with a fairly common mutation that gave his face the aspect of a piranha, right down to the lidless eyes and pronounced lower jaw overflowing with sharp teeth. The third was a short, thickset young woman with black hair and the profile of an Aztec priestess, her moving tattoo encroaching on her plump, pendulous breasts.

  The trio looked up at the tiny intruder in surprised wariness, but the boy with the malfunctioning tattoo quickly grinned and said, “Um, are you lost, Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Little Red Riding Gook,” said the young woman, exhaling a mouthful of blue smoke as she did so, the nozzle of the hookah in her hand. The fish-faced mutant gave a short bark of a laugh.

  Hanako walked closer to the trio, so petite she barely stood over them. Her face was blank, her expression unchanging – even when she reached out, slipped her fingers into the mouth of the grinning boy, closed her hand and wrenched his lower jaw off.

  On the ground beside the stocky young woman rested a machete with a thirteen-inch curved blade like a kukri knife’s. “What the blast!” she blurted, as her friend started making wet, inhuman sounds of surprise and pain, and lifted his hands to his gushing face. She snatched up the big knife, started pushing herself to her feet and swinging the machete in one movement. Hanako turned slightly, caught the gang girl’s arm in both hands and gave it an abrupt twist. The machete dropped and a white spear tip of bone jutted from the young woman’s weirdly bent arm. Still holding her wrist in one hand, Hanako switched her right hand to the woman’s howling face. She hooked her fingers into its eye sockets and thumb into its mouth, squeezed her hand into a fist, and tore much of the front of the face off. Hanako then pushed the woman away from her – as eyeless, wide-mouthed and raw red as a freshly damned soul plummeting away into the abyss – and pivoted to confront the third gang member, the boy with the piranha face, who had already launched himself to his feet. Already jerked a pistol out of a pocket on the outer leg of his combat pants.

  Hanako had begun stepping toward him when he opened fire, snapping off shot after shot and roaring in terror at the same time. Struck in the torso and neck, her diminutive frame jolting with each impact, Hanako was finally spun to face the opposite direction by the last few hits. Some projectiles had lodged in her, others passed right through her. A few sparks spat from a wound in her midsection, and a wisp of smoke curled out of the bloodless puncture in her neck. Otherwise, it was as neat a hole as her pleasure openings had been, before she’d had them sealed.

  But she was still standing, and she swiveled around slowly to face the boy with the gun again.

  “What?” he bellowed, backing away from her and fumbling to reload his weapon with a fresh magazine as the tiny woman strode purposefully toward him. “What are you?”

  What am I? Hanako thought -- as she reached out for him, and as he slapped the new mag into the hand grip of his gun. What indeed?

  HUCK

  4

  In his dream, Huck had wandered into the Jungle and come to the edge of its little man-made pond. Under its skin of algae he could discern shifting movement, like a restless sleeper tossing and turning under a blanket. Curious but wary, he drew closer, wading into the overgrown weeds there, until his shoes squished in slimy mud. He bent lower, hands on his knees, peering suspiciously at that troubled dreamer within his dream.

  A young girl surfaced with a splash, and seized hold of his right arm with a surprisingly powerful grip. He couldn’t make out her features well, for the coating of slime that clung to her, but her dark eyes were intense and unblinking and she seemed to be wearing a white bikini under that second skin of algae. Huck tried to straighten up, to pull away, but the girl – the naiad, the siren – pulled him off balance instead…and he plunged headfirst into the pond. Still gripping his wrist, she kicked her legs and swam down, down, into the seemingly fathomless depths of the small pond – dragging Huck along behind her, his lungs jealously clutching his last living breath.

  He awoke with a gasp, as if he’d kicked himself to the surface of a pool, but he cracked his gummy eyes and saw his familiar bedroom around him. Outside its window, he heard the crackle of gunshots, shouting and screams. It wasn’t that far away, and he figured it was what had roused him from his nightmares. From one nightmare to another.

  Artificial sunlight streamed in through the window, glaring in his face. He groaned, but was too tired – or masochistic -- to get up and take a pill that would banish his hangover entirely. Instead, he rolled onto his side, shut his eyes to the light and pulled his pillow up over his ear to muffle the gunfire. With
his headache, it was as though the gunfight raged inside his own skull.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but when next he awoke the intensity of the imitation sunlight had lessened so the day must be on the wane, evening drawing near. There was no more crackling gunfire, no more shouting commotion out there. What had all that been about?

  He swung his legs out of bed and sat there on its edge, hands on his knees, staring across at the window as he had stared into the restless waters of the pond. Staring as if into a mirror that showed him a visage he could no longer recognize.

  He considered going out…but go where, and to do what? He considered at least making himself a cup of coffee, but was too unmotivated to even rise from the bed and seek out his kitchen to perform that simple task. When the coffee was in his guts, then what would he do to occupy his waking hours?

  A shriek from the street below, so sudden and high-pitched it made his hand jerk toward a gun that wasn’t there. At least the cry had finally inspired him to stand, and he shuffled irritably toward the window, shifted its curtain to peer down toward the street nine levels below.

  His bedroom window faced onto the sidewalk that ran along one border of the park, its unruly plant life flooding between the bars. A young woman with long blond hair was fleeing along the sidewalk, away from an arm that had reached out to her through the fence’s bars and the dense underbrush. From this distance it appeared to be the slim arm of a woman or a child, and as Huck watched the straining arm suddenly dropped to the sidewalk and lay there, severed. From the rustling underbrush came whooping, hysterical laughter.