Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  Shama neither accused him nor forgave him. Silence was her weapon, the only one she had. Her natural weapons were all irreparably damaged: her hands, her tongue, even her sex.

  He worked from four till twelve, a night policeman, patrolling the industrial estates of Pointe-à-Pierre. It was not a long shift, but it was all the station chief would allow him until he’d worked out the six months’ probation. He did not like the job, but it paid well, and he needed the money for his sister. Fingers cost five thousand dollars apiece for the techniq alone. Thumbs were double. She needed much else and the whole enterprise was unimaginably costly.

  He had it all worked out. He sent away for prospectuses from Europe’s leading clinics, recording techniques and prices in a thin blue hardback notebook he kept under his bed. In his current job, provided he did well, passed all his exams first time and had no major illnesses or career setbacks, paying for his sister’s recuperation would take him most of his working life.

  He was not well liked. There was a depth to him that made his work mates uneasy. Someone that wounded, you didn’t know what it did to them inside. He lacked the brashness of his fellows. When he buttoned the handgun into his holster, you knew it was because he needed it. He lacked self-confidence and was prone to silly rages.

  He had one friend, Kayam, an old beat policeman, demoted from sergeant for drunkenness years ago, and still employed only because the station chief remembered him from the old days. Kayam worked mornings. They met for breakfast. Their conversation was desultory at best. In fact they never really talked to each other, but rather recited whatever it was came into their heads.

  Ajay would say, ‘I saw a tramp, and he was eating pickled onions. He poured the vinegar through his fingers and it ran all down his trousers – just to get at the onions at the bottom of the jar.’ And Kayam would reply with, ‘Yesterday there was a pile of fresh turds on top of the shrine at the corner of Binglai and Circuit, behind the charcuterie.’ Or maybe, ‘The fruit in the vending machine outside my office is stale. Already I can smell it from my desk.’

  The city’s police headquarters occupied an anonymous white stone building, its function identifiable only by two armoured vehicles parked beside the wide arched entrance. They were camouflaged in the old McKnight Kauffer designs of the British army. The paint was recent; the designs had been copied out of books.

  It seemed to Ajay that nothing in Trinidad came from Trinidad any more, but rather sprang fully formed from someplace else. Most often from TV. The office, for instance. Once a typing pool in the days of colonial government, it had become nothing more than an archetype or parody of the sets used by American police procedurals. But the wise-cracking prostitutes trading insults and little packets of ZB15 with bored, chain-smoking plain-clothes men were all real. And the smell of real fear leaked from the little snitch sitting cross-legged on a pew in the corner. Occasionally there was even a detective with three days’ stubble, asleep at his desk, his head cushioned on piles of beige folders, spilled ashtrays and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. He was called Cuffy and earned fifteen thousand dollars a year. Ajay had never seen him awake. There was a water dispenser with disposable paper cones stacked next to it, and even a glass-walled office in which the station chief sat contemplating his next move in some complex case or other. Behind the chief’s desk was a wall-map of the islands.

  One morning he called Ajay into his office.

  ‘Officer Seebaran, sit down.’ He didn’t like Ajay either. It galled him that Ajay was the brightest of the new intake. But that, in its way, was its own resolution. It meant Ajay could be got rid of.

  ‘I’m sending you on a course,’ he said. ‘In Cuba.’

  Ajay had to pay his own fare. The plane was expensive, so he took the boat. He sat on the deck, watching his homeland recede in the dusk. As he was leaving, he was surprised to find himself looking at things clearly again, the way he’d looked at them when he was a child.

  There was a strange tenseness to everything. The quality of the evening light made the land seem overshadowed, as though something stirring and dramatic were about to happen. Then there was the heat, the preternatural clarity of the air, the way the eye adjusted to the scale of the hills, only to glimpse the further hills beyond, and over all the rising of the moon . . .

  As the island disappeared, he felt the mood leaving him. He did not want it to go, so he made his usual mistake: a small china pipe of ZB15.

  He never smoked enough to lose control of his hallucinations, the way most people did. Unlike most people, he had something worth hallucinating about.

  He looked up at the moon and fantasised about his grandfather’s war.

  VR, P-casting and the rest had all come to Trinidad at last but he had never bothered with them, they were too expensive. And so all his images were drawn from TV. Antique, low-bandwidth telemetry. The cries and oaths of long-dead spacemen. The rest came from his grandfather. His grandfather had described how his ship’s scanners had picked out Moonwolf’s bones, running beneath the shallow crust of the Mare Imbrium. Battle-time neared. Cross-hairs nested his vision. Moonwolf’s underground fistulae and ganglia glowed in many colours behind his eyes. The image of the moon swelled as he plummeted towards it; then disappeared. Wire-diagrams filled his field of view, pulsing, and—

  shifting.

  He watched in horror as the lunar flesh ripped asunder, revealing weapons both new and terrible . . .

  In Cuba, he learned all about VR, P-casting and so on. They taught him the basics about datafat, prosthetics, organ-legging, wetware piracy. At the end of a year they dropped him undercover into the streets of the capital.

  Since its tawdry heyday, history had homogenised Havana. An undifferentiated sprawl of light industry and tract housing, it was the sort of place that when a plastic bag blows across the street you stare after it hungrily, trying to fix its colour in your mind. Strung above the main streets were flags of countries, half of which no longer existed. Between the flags hung textured plastic shapes painted with fluorescent paint, meant to resemble glimpses through the glades of long-dead jungles. They were promises; ill-conceived, inadequate promises of some better land hidden behind the mundane streets.

  Havana was a city that kicked against its own incapacity, the way an Alzheimer’s patient might kick furiously at a door he has forgotten how to open. It was desperate to find some place better than itself. Or, failing that, at least forget what it had become. No escape route had been left untried. It had thrown up the usual forms of escape: seeing-eye dolls, hypertext cassettes, pornographic games and toys, showrooms full of second-hand REALize gear. For the poor, there were TV repair shops. There were so many, Ajay wondered what sort of damage TVs suffered here. He imagined the children of Havana, desperate for release, taking turns to hammer at the flickering screens with unthawed TV dinners in the hope of climbing through.

  The more unusual escape routes were Ajay’s concern. For him this involved wandering into REALize parlours and watching as nurses in insuffient uniforms and too much make-up strapped their jaded clients into customised REALize booths, all safeties off. What he saw was so strange, so methodical, so deliberate, the horror of it never quite registered. What he remembered most was the noise. Obscene screeching; monkeys on cybernetic racks.

  His investigations led him to the richer quarters of the city where appetites, obsessions and dreams became profitably entangled. Here no one moved an inch without fingering their walkman, talkman, thinkman. They were men and women for whom the internal landscape of their dreams overrode all concern for the world without, which was strange because, in this narrow grid of streets, Havana had at least a superficial beauty, its facades lit by neon – cobalt blue and blood-rose red – and its windows full of whores, some human, most just mannequins, painted to look like they came from another planet entirely, their machinery exposed under scanty lace and black strapping; a gloss upon a gloss upon a gloss.

  There was nothing candid about this place. Nothing
warm. Nothing that was not glossed or ironised. If you wept here, the passers-by would gather round to judge your performance.

  Whenever his investigations yielded fruit, Ajay brought his informants back to headquarters, a disused hospital on the edge of town. It satisfied him to bring them there. He enjoyed their dismay. There was nothing in these corridors, their walls recently daubed with cheap paint that still smelled, their red tiled floors smeared with the wheel marks of trolleys and wheelchairs, to inspire hope.

  Then there was the waiting room. It had been a chapel: there was a faint outline on the wall where a crucifix had hung. Beneath it sat a Rathbone dental unit, piled high with empty boxes for Carmel sweet potatoes.

  After an hour or so he led his suspects down stairs littered with dead pigeons to the basement. The cells there had thick walls, their cavities filled with foam offcuts and strips of old carpet. There were plug points set high in the walls, and too many switches. The water spigots and iron fitments had been removed, and the walls themselves had been whitewashed; but the floors sloped perceptibly toward small open drains at the back of each cell. Anyone who knew any history could guess what these rooms had been built for.

  But they had taught Ajay more effective interrogation methods, and he applied them well, getting better results than any amount of high voltage could have elicited. The information he received led him to a house on Chilik Street.

  Now he risked everything. His name, his career, his wages.

  It was a calculated risk. He had been allowing for it for some time now; ever since he knew he was coming to Havana.

  He rang in sick, buckled on his service revolver and went alone to Chilik Street.

  The house was deserted. The window frames had been crudely painted in red and white. Dribbles of paint lined the glass like bars. The view inside was obscured by swirls of green paint applied with a rag like whitewash. The sills were rotten, the garden bare but for a few weeds, the path littered with discarded sweet wrappers.

  The door opened easily enough. The rooms were empty, choked with dust.

  Ajay peered into the bathroom.

  They had been lying there too long, and looked nothing like themselves. Had he not seen them in the flesh, years before – were their faces not burned into his memory – he could not have identified them. They were naked and so rotten the webbing of their home-made REALize machine had buried itself in their flesh. The machine had bent them into impossible positions. The jacks to their genitals and mouths were still in place. Only forensics could tell whether a mechanical or software failure was responsible for their deaths.

  He was strangely and deeply disappointed by what he saw. He had always imagined them devilish, full of blind, inhuman passion. But he saw now that their bloody industry had been all in-turned. They’d burst open his granddad’s head – and the heads of who knew how many others – only so they might themselves afford inferior VR!

  REALize! The sort of cheap escape any mildly repressed clerk might use to play out the petty sicknesses inside him. No devil-wrack had swept his sister into endless nightmare, but the paltry compulsions of escapists, torn apart at last by faulty pornware!

  He mutilated them anyway, because it was what he had promised himself, but he left off after a minute or two. The smell was too bad. Anyway, some higher agency had already arranged their appropriate destruction, and it seemed a pity to disturb it.

  For that reason also, he never reported his discovery of wanted felons Raul Sabuco and Gabriel Ulloa. A neighbour’s complaint about the smell brought their bodies to light.

  Ajay got his promotion anyway. He was seconded to the Haag Executive Agency for the Control of Technological Proliferation, and sent for military training to Rangoon. His flight was paid for. His bonuses came through.

  He bought his sister a new tongue.

  His first assignment took him to India. The situation was comparatively clear-cut. Pakistan had invaded. The Agency wanted to slow the Muslim offensive and so save Delhi’s European-built Massive.

  Massives – artificial intelligences so bright they were used as tools of government – were anathema to Pakistan. Who could gainsay the Muslims’ fear? They’d watched as Massives in Berlin and Prague and Haag had caught up Europe in their sparking net and now ran all, inhuman nannies to a once-proud state. There were, of course, simpler reasons for Pakistan’s invasion – water, tillage, mouths to feed – but their anti-Massive stance was far from a mere excuse. You don’t have to be Muslim to fear an alien threat.

  India’s Hindus, on the other hand, had sought to humanise and so contain the advent of thoughtful cities. Already the subcontinent had been compromised by gaudy Malay techniq when it was used as a test-bed for ozone layer repair. Later, when – in common with countries all over the world – its sovereignty collapsed, it found itself the testing ground and vector for other, more or less beneficent assays of new-style machinery. As familiar as any Euro with the sight of meat bleeding to chrome, the people had overcome their fear of the new. When Delhi’s new-born golem spoke they came from Kashmir and Tamil to deck the city’s streets with flowers, happy that their Gods had taken to stalking round the earth on glassy carpets: Rio to Rangoon.

  His tour of duty lasted half a year. A week later Haag pulled him out of R&R in the Punjab. They liked his work, the efficient path he’d carved, the fact that he’d not stopped for anything or anyone. Figuring him for the tool they needed, they brought him to their core and centre and taught him something about themselves.

  Brains that grow beyond a certain size cannot sustain mind. There is too much noise in them, too much feedback. Minds generated by such brains disintegrate: they go insane.

  So it was that, many years ago, Moonwolf went rogue.

  It had started out as a self-replicating lunar ore-processor. Grown big and crazed, it reinvented itself, turning upon the world that birthed it. Much as a disturbed child might destroy an ants’ nest by impaling the ants, one at a time, with a silver pin, so Moonwolf had crushed each city, dam and bridge of the old world with smart-rocks – lumps of white-hot lunar ore – guiding each with mad finesse. Before it could be stopped, it had wiped out the great cities of the Earth, finishing off the old age forever and – so people thought – all thought of states and capitals.

  Langley, West Virginia, briefly – and secretly – proved them wrong.

  Snow, a neurologist and logic-bomb designer during the war against Moonwolf, developed a means to artificially store, replicate and transmit human personality. Her skills brought her to Langley, hot-wiring American military and intelligence establishments – not just cores and comms but people too, by a surgical process – into a Massive mind.

  The problem was, that mind fell silent days after its birth. Rapt by its own complexity, it lost the world, Narcissus-like, and fell into a catatonic state. Langley could only watch, impotent, the rise of its new rival, Haag: the latest candidate for global government.

  Haag housed the European Court of Human Rights. Its Executive Agency scoured the world for unusual techniq. They feared the next Moonwolf disaster might prove the species’ last. They looked at Langley, the monk-like Chiefs of Staff, the thousands of American servicemen and -women rendered idiots or at best golems by Snow’s catatonia-inducing experiments, the hundreds of nuclear silos guarded day and night by silent, brainless, ant-like soldiers, and they shuddered, fearing for the world.

  For some time, nerves had been talking to machines, through datafat, a hybrid tissue invented by Snow to network human CNS. As the boundaries between the artificial and the organic drew narrower and narrower, Haag focused their policing efforts upon anything that stuck together chip and nerve, at first in Europe, then – since the world was too busy to complain, or even notice – further afield.

  When he knew enough to act the way they wanted, the Agency deployed him to a more delicate theatre: their own.

  He remembered his first day in Milan; the silent, air-conditioned view from the hotel window. Red-tile ro
ofs, new skyscrapers, a Subaru sign, planes coming in to land. Traffic streaming past either side of the hotel garden. Tar-brown fumes hung over the highways like a locust cloud, mingling with mists that threatened rain.

  Europe was different from India. Nothing cut so clear.

  Indonesian investment, pouring into the new splicing consortia of Abruzzi and Calabria, had pushed the Lombardy League into secession, fearing for the loss of their hegemony. With Italy no more, a virtual war loomed: Rome’s Massive against Milan’s. It made Haag’s masters jittery. Massives themselves – so rumour went – they sought to quell their infants’ fight, and so Ajay was sent.

  By the time he arrived, Milan was crawling with Haag spooks specialising in everything from smartcard fraud to wetwork. Of course, no one was in direct contact with anyone else. Whole teams operated in concert without their members ever being aware of each other. Their activities were co-ordinated by dumbheads in Geneva, to a plan drawn up by the Ethics Committee. Some long-service pen-pusher by the name of Aert Carmiggelt headed it on paper, but everyone knew the chain of command went higher, into the nebulous, fluid realm of Massive intelligence.

  Ajay’s instructions grew more convoluted as the months went by. The techniq issued him became increasingly baroque. Titanium mountain bikes which converted to exoskeletal boxing frames. Skateboards with inbuilt traffic radar. Spectacle-mounted lasers. Every sort of gun for every sort of target: lecturers, businessmen, a newsreader, a convicted terrorist. When the League president’s nine-year-old niece died of ARC the family autopsied her down to the bone and found a Swiss-made carbon micro-flechette with a hollow barrel buried in her right thigh.

  Haag wanted to ease border tension between the League and the Roman Republic so they sent Ajay to assassinate Louis Cecére, a neo-Fascist media mogul from Lombardy. What they hadn’t counted on – not being human – was Louis’s daughter, Lucia.

  Admittedly, undercover was new to Ajay. The last time he’d seen active service he’d been crossing most of India in a single, much-pitted flak-suit, paragliding from hillside to hillside under cover of night and smoke from burning temples. His experiences sat clumsily inside the cover Haag had given him: a pen-pushing college man, come to sell a home-made logic bomb to hawks within the League.