Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Rosa said, and swung the blade, chopping the mouse in half. The cloth’s stiffened edge buried itself in the ripple-effect tiling.

  The back half of the mouse spasmed and lay still. The front half described an erratic circle, hit the blade and rolled onto its head.

  She looked again at the wall, the new door. She walked up to it. It was trying to be invisible, but there was something wrong with it. Its strength was ebbing. Behind its death-swirl, Rosa saw it as it had once been, in the time before Mother. There was writing on it.

  LIVE HOSTS ACTIVE WITHIN

  ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE TO ENHANCED PERSONNEL

  ENTRY PROCEDURES UNDER CONTINUAL REVISION

  READ HANDBOOK BEFORE PROCEEDING

  In one corner there was a panel. Rosa examined it. A print-lock. Rosa pressed her thumb to the scanning plate and closed her eyes.

  From out the panel a green button emerged, raised red letters round its edge:

  PRESS ME

  She obeyed.

  The door whined open. Jagged, confusing shadows webbed bays and porticoes, mezzanines and warehousing gear. Panels set in walls and pillars flickered up. Threads of light intercut each other through the damp air.

  The shelves about her were hidden behind plastic sheeting, as brown and cracked as that in the hospital. Through the gaps she glimpsed stalks and mandibles: the hall’s stock-taking robots had taken refuge here, hanging from the rails of disused conveyors like bats in a cave.

  Other screens – of stronger, suppler stuff – hid whole corners of the hall. Light came through them soft and honeyed. Rosa thought of grottoes, candle light, woodland glades at evening, fanciful landscapes like those which spilled unending from her mother’s screens.

  She set off for the brightest part of the old warehouse: a mezzanine set at an angle to the others, webbed with blue-white veils.

  Rosa tore them aside.

  Chairs and terminals stretched away from her in rank and file. Blue embers spilled from monitors embedded in slanting perspex work surfaces, all shrouded in sheet upon sheet of slick, sterile plastic. The desks were all pointed the same way. Before them, nested in colour-coded pipes and cables, hung a metal egg. It was three times Rosa’s height, and there was a window in it. Rosa approached it and looked in.

  Through a greenish haze she made out five balls of living tissue. She knew they were alive because they throbbed gently; the metal egg, she concluded, must be an incubator of some sort. But by the way the balls of tissue were arranged – suspended from iron hooks and thick black wires – the space within resembled a charnel house more than any incubator.

  The balls were not smooth like bladders, but were made up of different parts, jumbled together without scheme or care. Rosa tried to work out how they were put together, but all she got was a series of crazy, nonsensical impressions: veins wrapping ribs like wire; quivering muscles, punctured by little horse-shoes of fractured bone; horny, elongated shapes – noses, fingers, pubic bones – poking in and out restlessly, like tongues . . .

  Rosa pressed her face against the glass for a better look. The ball nearest her shuddered. It had a mouth. It was grinning. It had fingertips for teeth. Absently, they stroked the ash-blonde hair on its tongue.

  ‘Toys!’ Rosa exclaimed, entranced, and looked round for a door. She’d not had a new toy in ages. Here at last was something new to amuse her!

  Rosa.

  The voice came from inside her head. She glanced round her, startled. The room was empty.

  She looked back. The balls of living jumbled flesh had disappeared. Even the strange mouth was gone. Only the grin remained, spread across a billion faces, receding in ranks to infinity, and the faces were one face – a woman’s – repeated endlessly.

  ‘So beautiful,’ gasped Rosa, terrified.

  A woman’s face. Her hair was a white dandelion clock, an even three inches over her pale skull. Her eyes were black pits, no iris visible; in each ivory orb a gaping hole.

  Rosa reached out to touch the window, found no window there. No window, no egg, no warehouse. The heads were all around her.

  ‘Are you my mother?’ Rosa whispered, awed.

  The heads cackled.

  ‘Not your mother,’ said the first.

  ‘But like her,’ said the second.

  ‘Younger,’ said the first again.

  ‘And older, by millennia!’ The third said this, and bared her teeth: they glinted, sharp as steel.

  ‘Let’s touch you,’ said the first.

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ cried the heads together.

  ‘Feel you!’ the third head cried.

  Then, all together, ‘EAT YOU!’

  Rosa screamed and flailed about. The heads came closer, open-mouthed, sharp-toothed – and disappeared.

  The world righted itself.

  Rosa spun away from the egg. She was free. She was back in the warehouse. She had escaped!

  From what? she wondered – and fell to the floor. She stared up at the metal egg, and at the monitors, ranged before it, shrouded in plastic blankets; and at the blue sterile curtains, separating this alcove from the rest of the warehouse.

  She cursed herself. She should have known what this place was. An armoury! And in that egg, five weapons of some sort. Logic bombs? Perhaps. They had breached her mind, had raped her more thoroughly than any conspiracy of snakes.

  With a last, uneasy glance at the metal egg, she turned and walked back to the tear she had made in the sterile curtain and out, towards the warehouse door.

  Logic bombs. Bombs with personality. But whose?

  Her mother’s?

  The idea was irresistible. Was it possible? She wondered, was a bomb’s word to be trusted?

  Rosa.

  She turned, spun, wheeled about, a leaf, spinning helplessly in a stream.

  Forgive us, begged the disembodied host, receding fast, we can only eat.

  Rosa would have asked them why, but had no mouth.

  I made ourselves that way, cried the heads, far-distant, an appalling speck—

  Once again the world righted itself.

  Rosa found herself stumbling out of the arsenal. The open doorway loomed up at her. She fetched up against it.

  Beyond, the mouse-head clicked and klaxoned – its idea of laughter.

  She stooped, undid the wire round her waist and threaded it through the mouse’s eye. ‘You knew that would happen, didn’t you!’

  The mouse-head swallowed its tongue.

  They flew him Stealthwise over Mexico and dropped him from a great height.

  He hit the ocean at terminal velocity and blacked out. He woke to the sounds of his skin-suit, whining and clucking as it hardened against the sea’s pressure. Head-ups blinked and scrolled before him: currents, topography, ETA. The Clipper lay hidden under sonar shrapnel, four thousand metres down south of the Islas Tres Marias. Fifty metres off the Clipper handshook him, lighting up, dim grey-green, scaring fish. The shrapnel, light-smart, swam away, revealing the secret hangar. Pipes, wires and robot arrays towered around him as he sank.

  Ajay spreadeagled himself and landed on the Clipper’s cockpit housing. The airlock groaned open.

  Ajay swam inside. The lock cycled. Air filled the tank. Dark and loamy, it carried with it a hint of old bile.

  The inner hatch slid open. He climbed in, tucked himself snugly into the pilot’s couch and ducked as he pressed the recliner. An instrument panel swung up and over him. ‘Let’s play,’ he said, so the craft would recognise him.

  ‘CAPTAIN,’ it sneered, through outworn learning circuits. It had spent too many years with only its own voice for company: its speech had become a parody of itself. ‘WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?’

  What shall we play? The words sent Ajay’s wandering mind off on a tangent. Why, the usual game of course, he thought, morose and weary after his long sink. He thought of Shama, the rock outside their window, her blinkless stare. If he came home with the goods, Herazo had promised Shama a new se
lf. It was a big promise for anyone to make, even a mayor, and Herazo had been full of big promises lately. To his staff, to the press, to himself even. Herazo’s deals were reputedly solid. But men like Herazo write their own reputations—

  ‘WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?’ the Clipper insisted.

  Ajay did his best to concentrate. He recited Dayus Ram’s co-ordinates, numbers Lucia had given him in exchange for her life, long ago.

  ‘A-OKAY CAP’N.’ Gloves and boots erupted from the cockpit’s pearly skin. Ajay allowed them to enwrap him, slick and tight. A robot claw plugged his mouth with an oddly articulated plastic plate. He flexed his fingers and chewed on the clench-plate, feeling for the craft’s responses, its limits and articulations. Needles pierced his arms and legs, puncturing veins. Needless discomfort, this. There were no swabs, no disinfectants, and the bomber’s medical system had long since run out of psychoactives. Needles pricked the corners of his eyes. His lids froze apart. Fine plastic nozzles clouded and cracked with age sprayed stale air over his pupils, making them smart: the medical system was out of saline, too. Mechanical crane flies minced over his paralysed eyes, treading degradable plastic films over his corneas. Preparing him for sea-launch, the Clipper stole his eyes. Cross-hairs webbed his vision.

  ‘SORTIE A STROKE TWO-FOUR-ONE-ONE-ONE-NOUGHT-THREE-SEVEN-TWO STROKE SERVO AT COM, SEEBARAN TO NAVIGATE, STOP, CONFIRM.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ Ajay grumbled through a mouthful of plastic. Two hundred and forty million missions? A nonsense. All but a few were self-tests, games the Clipper played with itself. Crippled and trapped in permanent night, masturbation had been its only pleasure.

  The sty grew bright as Rosa walked in. Pink walls gleamed like a shell’s insides. Muzak bleared the air. The nursing pig bellowed come-suck. Rosa stood her ground and tutted, motherly: shit everywhere, as usual. The pig was wallowing in it again.

  Rosa scooped up the worst with a shovel and swabbed the floor with a mop. A few minutes later she was back with scented water, towels, soap. She cleaned as far as the pig’s rump, then heaved it over bit by bit. The pig squealed and flailed its legs; they were short and dumpy and varicosed. Its ankles however were slim and its feet, which had never borne its weight, were smooth like a child’s. Its vestigial arms – not much more than tiny hands sprung from fat-padded shoulders – wove the air.

  ‘Not so bad,’ Rosa crooned, patting its long ribcage. She had to be gentle. The nursing pig was vast, its spine fragile. It could flex a little, gnashing its supernumerary ribs so that the skin beneath its forty breasts turned black and blue; but it had never been able to propel itself, let alone stand. Its limbs served no purpose, unless to remind it of the human original from which it was sprung. Maybe that was why it cried so much.

  Once Rosa did more to make it comfortable, packing it with pillows and mattresses, covering its gargantuan nakedness with coloured cloths. But each time she returned, the bedding and makeshift nappies would be gone; perhaps it ate them.

  These days she contented herself with bucket and map and towel. The pig seemed just as grateful. It snorted at her pleasantly.

  Next, and last before she suckled, Rosa brushed its hair. ‘Red like mine,’ she crooned. ‘So beautiful!’

  The pig began to weep. Great waxy tears ran down its coarse red face.

  ‘Hair just like mine,’ said Rosa and, not knowing why, wept too. Too late she heard footsteps approach. She plucked herself free, startled, milk drooling down her chin.

  From the corridor came the sound of angry wasps.

  ‘I must go!’ said Rosa. The pig, its senses dulled by a lifetime of bowel complaints and pink walls, blinked at her blandly.

  ‘My sister nears!’

  The pig purred. Soon another suckling!

  Rosa flung herself out the room – too late. Round the bend of the corridor came Elle.

  ‘Lady!’ Rosa moaned and sank to her knees. Wasps filled her head. Her ears bled. Hair fuzzed up through her skin. Her teeth and tongue swelled. Her mouth bent into a muzzle. Foreign stenches filled her nose. Nerve-wolfed, she whined and cowered before her mistress.

  Lady Elle – Ma’s favourite, keeper of the slabs and crypts where Mother made and unmade flesh – cast her cloth of gold aside, and smiled at Rosa.

  Sister! Well met . . .

  Her voice ran like honey between Rosa’s streaming ears. Soothed, Rosa dared to look up.

  Elle shone like the sun behind clouds of chiffon streaked with Mother’s colours. Her face was much like Rosa’s, but golden and unblemished. Her frame too matched Rosa’s, but it was transfigured by a grace Rosa could never hope to emulate. Elle had no hair, red or otherwise, but aerials of copper and gold waved about her tonsured head like the antennae of some heavenly insect. Whole landscapes ebbed and flowed in her arm’s unfurling: Little sister, approach sweetly.

  Rosa padded over on gnarled feet, tail wagging.

  Elle lowered her hand towards Rosa’s bent head. The wasps began to sting . . .

  Howling, Rosa scampered back.

  Forgive! cried Elle, mortified. Forgive me sister. I forgot my presence scalds you.

  Rosa whined and licked her teeth with her great, lolling tongue.

  Elle stepped over to the nursing room door. She looked in at the pig.

  Such tender care you offer, she breathed in Rosa’s mind, a compliment to honey any number of wasp stings.

  ‘It is my place,’ growled Rosa, roughly.

  Elle turned to her, mortified. I did not mean to patronise. Nor did I choose to be exalted.

  Rosa sank her head between her paws, admonished. ‘Forgive my churlishness.’

  We’re not so very different, child. Both friendless, after all.

  ‘True.’

  She extended her hand to Rosa, a limpid, melancholy gesture. Bitter fate, for both of us, that sisters cannot touch.

  Elle’s regretful musings moved Rosa near to tears.

  Begone now, you’ll be burned.

  The words reminded Rosa of the mouse, the new door, the five weapons. They too had burned her, entering her skull as Elle could do. But they had meant her harm. ‘My lady—’

  Take care not to tarry, dear sister.

  ‘Things important—’

  What?

  So many questions. Did Elle know of the egg? Could she divine the weapons’ parentage? Had their mother made them? Who were they?

  Who were who? Use words, little cousin. Your wireless is weak and fitful.

  Rosa made to speak – but stopped herself. Elle was Ma’s guardian, the overseer of Ma’s experiments. She had Ma’s ear. Her radar tonsure broadcast all to Ma, received Ma’s wisdom back. It was not wise, Rosa told herself, to let their mother know she had entered a room once hidden from her.

  She thought of the nursing pig. Hair like mine. What had it done to be so transformed? The more she thought about these things, the less she trusted Mother. ‘Forgive me, Lady,’ she slobbered. ‘Your rays confound me.’

  Imperilled sweetness, run along!

  So Rosa ran. Our from under Elle’s radio haze, the wasps departed and her body regained its proper shape. Rosa was herself again. She looked back where she had come. Lady Elle was gone. ‘Goodbye, sister,’ she sighed and, missing her, she waved.

  Tethered at last to Dayus Ram, Ajay stared with cybicked eyes through the pitted bulkheads of the seemingly derelict space station. Processors crunched his sight, graphics expanding and interleaving to form impressions of the Massive’s alien flesh.

  Ajay gazed in wonder at Dayus Ram’s nervous systems, glowing in many colours. This was the thing itself: the human/Massive hybrid, Frankenstein-manqué, Ms Snow.

  Wire-diagrams filled his field of view, pulsing, and—

  shifting.

  His wonder turned to horror as Ram’s bulkhead ripped itself to shreds, revealing – arms. A hundred, a thousand of them. Gigantic babies’ arms . . .

  Ajay typed, his blood up. ACCESS TO ARSENAL CODE BLUE.

  ‘BLUE. BLU – GU-GU,�
�� the Clipper stuttered, faking malfunction. It loved to play dead. It was the nearest it could get to orgasm.

  Ajay typed. ACCESS TO ARSENAL.

  Babies’ fingers hundreds of feet long uncurled, reached out and tickled the Clipper’s underbelly. Ajay felt them through his teeth.

  He tore the clench-plate out his mouth. ‘You’re suiciding!’

  The lights died.

  ‘Status!’ Ajay snapped, bewildered, hidden in the darkness.

  The lights re-set; came back on, idle/ready.

  ‘SORTIE TERMINATED. LOG AS SYSTEMS ASSESSMENT, F FOR FAILURE.’

  Above him, baby nails picked at the airlock door.

  The Clipper sniggered, old and mad. ‘PILOT INADEQUATE,’ it sneered.

  The gloves and boots melted away.

  Wailing, Ajay scrambled out the seat and floated up into the airlock. He scrambled in, tugging a helmet over his head.

  The hatch closed. The lock cycled.

  The escape sled was waiting for him, its life-rig winking ready. He grabbed the sled, tethered himself and pressed Eject. The sled leapt forward and careered into Dayus Ram’s torn bulkhead. Half-concussed, he fought for hand-holds, forgetting for a moment he was still tethered to the sled.

  Something snared his suit, tugging him away from his seat. He twisted about. The something snaked round his waist, tickling him through the thick material. He looked around to see what it was, but the helmet obscured his view. He felt around. The something seized his hands, and then his legs. A dark tendril wrapped itself around his face plate. He struggled to free himself, but whatever it was, it had him tight. He felt the kevlar strapping give way around him. The sled slid away. A dreadful hissing started up inside his helmet. His air supply! From the small of his back, he felt an icy coldness spread. His air lines were severed, the valves jammed somehow—

  Shock descended like a pewter cloud. He closed his eyes, death-ready, self abandoned—

  The next thing he knew his helmet was gone. He knew it was gone because he could feel a breeze. Breathing in, he found the air around him curiously warm, and sweet, like the outpoured breath of an infant. Startled, he opened his eyes. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.