Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014
Page 8
"Occupation?"
"Catamite, class three."
"Tell me Mr. Boivick, do you know this man?"
There was the yellowed newspaper clipping. There was the face he somehow knew, yet did not know. There was the name "William Milhous Daguerreotype." Ice ran through his veins. The glowing tips of the cop cigarettes seemed to grow more alert, as if smelling his fear.
"Answer the question," said the Gray. "Do you know this man?"
"I— I—"
"We've already tested him tonight," said another Gray. "Come on, Mauve. I know they all look alike, but really."
"Yes, Mentor."
"Thank you Mr. Wall," said Boy Vic, finding his voice.
"Get out of here," said the senior Gray. "We've got a quota to meet. One more and we're done."
#
5. Skybox at the Arena
Top Prime Cut, the freshest of the fresh meat, made a dramatic entrance at the restaurant overlooking the killing field.
The windows there were ceiling to floor, and the best tables were along the windows. Wearing a blue metallic jumpsuit he strode in with exaggerated motions, accompanied by an entourage of four escorts. He went straight to the observation area beside the last of the tables, where he pushed his way among the gamblers and sportsmen until he was near the window.
"Seven, chair," he said to one escort, who promptly dropped to all fours.
Top Prime Cut sat upon the robot's lumbar region.
"Five, back rest."
Another escort stepped over to become the chair's back.
"Three, ottoman."
A third escort made himself into a footrest.
"Number one, tell me the status of the game."
"Yes, sir. The game is already in progress. Both the agonizers and the tinmen are on the field. Talon 99 is performing the hundred cuts on one Red Rick, while Nick 57 is chasing a star-mad called Karl."
Top Prime Cut examined the agonizer through a pair of opera glasses.
"Hmm, he seems stiff tonight. Put a wager on him." He used hand signals to give details.
"At once sir," said the escort, and he moved away.
Top Prime Cut lazily got out a pack of Don Juans from his breast pocket. The gamblers were smoking IQ enhancers, the sportsmen were smoking Sharps or Charismas, but he provocatively lit up that post-sex buzz that only a Don can deliver. He was on top of the world: a few more sales, a couple big wins, and he would get out, go back home to wherever it was. That was the key, to quit while ahead, and get out.
Glancing around he saw another worker of the skin trade, a guy a few years older but obviously nearing the end. He felt a moment of sympathy until a waiter intruded, saying something to the cat, who agreed and then followed the waiter through the crowd.
"A score!" thought Top. He tapped his ashes into the waiting hand of escort Five.
#
6. Behind the Locked Door
Boy Vic entered the small room, expecting a supply closet, but found it lined with telescreens like a security center or a TV broadcasting workstation. Screens showed various angles of the agonizer doing his art upon living flesh, while others showed the tinman softening up the star-mad by running laps around the track, while another showed an entirely different location, where four mummies played cards in the big room of an empty house. Just when he was going to ask about the place they had entered, he felt a sting at his neck. His legs gave out but she caught him like a pro and laid him out on the floor before locking the door.
He tried to get up but discovered he could not move at all.
"Time to report," she said, unbuttoning her waiter's shirt while she started doing some sort of belly dance, rolling her hips, swaying in a circular motion, moving around him with fast, tiny steps. He had the sickening feeling that they had done this before, several times, yet he could not remember. Probably she had used a wiper on him. That such alien technology was forbidden to humans meant nothing to an enemy agent. Still, he dredged up her name, and he played it at once.
"I have questions, Joanne."
That made her miss a beat.
"Oh dear," she said. "Very naughty." She frowned and opened up her shirt. Her emro came whirling out, corkscrewing like a seeking serpent from between her breasts.
Trying to land another hit, or at least keep her off balance, he said, "Tell me about William Milhous Daguerreotype."
She laughed at him with contempt, but her eyes flickered toward the screens, so he studied them as she continued dancing around him. Since it seemed impossible that the mystery man would be on the killing field, he focused instead on the card players in their empty room. There! In the corner he saw a corpulent body, a corpse. The mummies were guarding a cadaver.
"He's as fat as Santa," said Boy Vic with wonder.
"His kind, they usually travel in pairs," she said, stepping on his hand, grinding his fingers into anguish beneath her rubber heel. "Sometimes similar and bland, to escape notice. Other times they are more distinctive. So, what do you think? Are we looking for another fat man, or, say, a little boy?"
But Boy Vic was the running star-mad Karl, lungs on fire, whip cracks popping behind him from the chasing tinman. Focused on the ground ahead, a slip or stumble would be very bad, but he glanced up and saw the agonizer working on Red Rick…
Then he was Red Rick, suffering the death of a hundred cuts, remembering all the yummy pain he had dished out in the skinning over so many years. He looked up to the sky, but stopped on the glass walls of the skybox, where he could just barely make out one face in the teeming crowd…
Then he was Gary Gambler, looking down on the butchery field from the restaurant, mind buzzing from brainiac smoke, and Boy Vic thought, "Wait, what was that? How did I just jump from one to another?"
He fought to stay within Gary. He struggled to make Gary come to his aid, sending the impulse to go to the strange video room. When that failed, he tried to urge a visit to the restroom. Nothing. He could not even get Gary to look at something else. It was all too passive.
Then he was back in his body, and Joanne was settling down to work.
Boy Vic looked away to the telescreens, focusing on the one with enemy agent William Milhous Daguerreotype. That was a code name. That was his partner. The corpse gave a shudder, sat up, and looking straight into the camera, its fingers went through a rapid sequence of positions, telling him, "Your skins in them."
And then he knew. The line of his missing skins formed a thread through the dark maze, starting with the one returned by the agonizer.
He was Joanne, her throbbing emro attached to the broken and bleeding body of Boy Vic. She was rummaging through his junk drawer. He looked over her collection of skins, found the key among those she had taken from him, and forced her emro to send it into the writhing figure on the floor.
Shrieking, she stood up.
"What have you done?"
The final piece was in place. He knew who he was. He knew why he had come to Manville.
The taxi driver who forced him that time after smoking a Taurus for the bull strength of a longshoreman, was talking to a rider about the agonizer he had taken to Cold Steel, while the radio played "On Broadway"…
Red Rick thought, "Putting pain into a stranger is the greatest pleasure" as he died in a throbbing haze…
The subway driver was half asleep, guiding the train from station to station. What you smoking to get those eyes? You know the drill. Can't you see they're not like us? "Next stop, Overdrive. Overdrive…"
Gary Gambler saw Top Prime Cut smile broadly at the early death of Red Rick: a long shot bet paid off. Gary resolved to follow his lead…
Karl tripped and the tinman was upon him with terrible efficiency…
The shambling scavenger, picking through the garbage can, thinking over ways of merging, raping, salivated at the thought of the next skin…
"Boy Vic" was a code name. They had landed in the wastes, entered Manville separately to avoid det
ection. Something had gone wrong, and his codes had been taken away from him, enmeshed in the skins. Or maybe that was the plan after all. And when the timer went off, the one skin had somehow come back to him like a homing pigeon, starting the reintegration process.
And now he was his true self again, a restored being. He had never been human.
Boy Vic spoke the Annihilation Code, saying, "I have come to burn the autumnal city."
There was a roar of blue-white light, a column of energy going straight up, and Manville was obliterated.
###
Michael Andre-Driussi this year has seen the publication of two stories at Bastion, as well as stories at Child of Words and Wicked Words Quarterly. He also produced two books of genre reference: True SF Anime, about Japanese cartoons; and Handbook of Vance Space, a guide to the many worlds of SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance. This story draws inspiration from the work of Philip K. Dick.
Shenzhen Blues
Spencer Wightman
Sam sneers at the man draped over the arcade machine. He's limp as a dead goose, wheezing loudly through a bloodied nose. Oblivious as Jake takes his wallet and hands it to her. Sam frowns, shakes the kink from her wrist, and counts out the fifteen hundred owed. Star Racer's green logo flashes on the arcade screen, neon light making her wince until she remembers the goggles hanging from her neck and snaps them over her eyes. The saturation of the room dims as the display turns on and adjusts to her scarred retinas, bringing cold relief. She runs a hand through her tangled hair, squints with rheumy eyes as Jake slides the man onto the ground.
“He unconscious?” she asks, folding the bills into her back pocket.
“Yeah, he’ll be out for a while.” Jake peers at her, grimaces. “Shit, Sam. You want ice for that?”
His eyes shine bright blue and white, tugging Sam's gaze like fishhooks. Implants from Masai Corporation, harvested in Saigon. Sam looked them up last month. A nice model. They hold her weary gaze long enough that Jake quirks his head in concern.
Sam sighs, touches her face. It's a soft, puffy mess. She clicks her tongue ruefully, fumbles through her leather jacket. It had been a long time since she'd taken a punch. Funny how the body forgets something as simple as ducking yet remembers how to throw a wicked hook. A drop of blood falls off her lip and smacks against her left shoe, too fast for her to catch.
Jake looks disturbed, puts his hands in his pockets to take them out again. “Standing there, eating his punches . . .” He shakes his head. “I didn't think you were tough like that.”
Sam looks at him from the corner of her eye and pulls a homemade cigar from her sleeve like a magic trick. “Lucky, Jake. That's all.”
Jake shakes his head and turns back to the machine, pulling the rag from his belt to wipe away dots of blood. A tendril of odorless purple smoke spirals from Sam’s lit cigar toward the ceiling. It reminds her of the incense sticks burned on summer holidays, and of the Confucian priests who solemnly carry them. A familiar memory unwittingly fills her mind, of a summer shrine and a dead snake, and her brother carrying her piggyback. A long-past scene from her childhood. She sucks in a cloud of smoke and holds it in her lungs. She does not want to remember.
Mutated opiates flood her bloodstream and tug Sam's lips into a pitiful addict's smile that she long ago stopped trying to hide. She feels a tightening, like a mesh stretching across her face, as the drug quick-heals her collection of scrapes and bruises. Endorphins follow, a soulless, undeserved joy trickling down her spine. Sam accepts the seduction and falls into chemical bliss, breathing the drugs in and out like a mantra. The sinful act calms her and keeps her face scar-free, as if warding away time. And the memory is gone.
The zoning machines rumble awake and Sam turns to the window, savoring a lingering taste of blood. She has seen the machines' nighttime feeding many times, yet still she watches, fascinated, as they rise into the grunge of low-income high-rises and security-barred strip malls. They always come the same way at the same time: crawling out of the ground at the witching hour.
After a minute of ominous stillness, one of the machines screeches a warning siren and they all latch on to a crumbling brick house. The first rips away the cracked driveway while the others tear down the walls, suck out the insides, and leave the rest an empty carcass for the cleaners, who hover nearby.
Sam's daily canvas had changed to this melancholy four years ago, the day she left the shining towers of Laishan. By the time she turns from the window, her lip wears an ugly scab and the skin around her eye has faded from black to yellow.
“Anyone else around?” she asks, swaying unsteadily.
Jake furrows his brow, pauses sliding a tumbler back and forth across the plastic counter long enough to reply. “Not any gamblers. Why? Are you leaving?”
Sam had paid two hundred to play her last match, and still Jake worries that she'll leave without spending more. “Well there's no one else to play, is there?”
“It's not that late. People will come when the soaplands close.”
His whining voice makes Sam turn away in discomfort. He's wrong, and they both know it. The sad businessmen will go from soaplands straight to hajal lounges, drunkenly wondering and never discovering what lies beyond Jake's unassuming door. And if by curiosity or mistake they do wander inside, they'll quickly leave. Jake's is a small place, a shadowed nook in a wall of hypnotic laser shows and plexiglass. There is no lasting comfort here, only the songs of arcade machines and the desperate tension of a barkeep avoiding eviction.
Sam buttons her jacket and shifts from her stool to leave when an unidentified call blinks up on her display. She checks the number of credits in her account and decides to answer.
“This is Felix. I want to set up a match with you.”
The caller's voice sounds Ivy League polished and faintly nasal. Sam pictures him sitting with his feet up on a desk, grinning at someone across the room.
“You won your last few games, so I think—”
“Fifteen hundred,” Sam interrupts. “When do you want to play?” She ignores Jake's interested stare and waves for him to pour her a drink.
“My client has ten thousand in mind.”
Ten thousand. Far too much for a single game. Sam hasn't heard of a bet that big since the old tournaments. She laughs scornfully and covers her glass before Jake can pour.
“I've never heard of you, Felix, so don't fuck with me. Fifteen hundred, yes or no?”
Felix hesitates, seems taken aback. “Look,” he says, finding his words carefully, “my reputation is easy to find, and so is yours. I'm taking a risk here. Are you still playing at Jake's?”
Sam hears the smirk through his words and rubs her tired eyes in frustration. She imagines the microscopic tendrils in her irises fraying, burning to the milky white of a shirt left too long in the sun. Her pipe is at home where she left it on the coach, waiting to ease the lingering hurt circuiting her head like an electric hum. Meanwhile, this conversation has already drifted far from where Sam wants it to be.
“It's quarter after twelve,” she says, stepping off her stool. “Give me a good reason not to hang up on you.”
Felix makes a sound as if he's about to say something, but pauses, and Sam hangs up. She sighs, blocks the number, and waves goodbye to Jake as the bar's metal door shooshes open onto the sidewalk. A gap is made for her and she slips into the crowd, leaving the bill on her tab and Jake alone behind the counter.
Far down the street, the zoning machines snake back and forth on their treads, flashing red-and-yellow emergency lights through the smog as they spin layers of fifty-square-foot cages. Sam makes a thin smile as she deactivates the magnetic lock on her hover bike. “Cages” is the colloquial term. The mainstream news outlets call them “micro-apartments,” a buzzword that sounds progressive and follows the charade that they're part of a wave of urban renewal. In reality, they're the shithole nighttime refuge for Shenzhen's rampant underclass. A booming business modeled straight fr
om Hong Kong's concrete jungle.
“It worked well in Kowloon,” the experts say, “and it'll work well in Shenzhen.” Well, they'd said that about privatized police too, but no one seems to remember.
Sam swallows a sigh and checks her bike’s battery charge. Nine percent remaining. Enough to get home. She moves the cash from her back pocket to the bike's security box and wishes that all of it could go toward paying off her student debt. She swallows through a lump in her throat and absently wipes a spot of wet from her cheek. Heavy raindrops begin to patter loudly off her jacket and soak her hands; cold, numbing kisses on her stiff knuckles.
As she waits for the lane to open, a red hover car shaped like a football pulls up ahead of her and lets out three men in tailored blue suits. They swagger onto the sidewalk, pushing each other playfully and talking loudly in Korean. Sam makes a che sound between her teeth and eyes them balefully. Rich kids slumming in a tier three district, the sort who've bored of Seoul. Only trouble.
They walk closer and Sam can't help but give the tallest a moment of slack-jaw appreciation. Rich or not, the man has the flawless face of a model. He's smoking a needle-thin cigarette, and as he passes, he reaches to take it from his lips and Sam notices the tattoos covering his hands.
Their eyes meet and in that moment he smiles and grabs her arm with a thick hand, holding her firmly still. Pheromones overwhelm Sam's sense of smell as he steps toward her and leans over the bike, close and intimate enough to make them look like a couple. The two other Koreans stop in front of them on the sidewalk, continuing their conversation and blocking the view of the late-night revelers milling past.
Before Sam thinks to say something the handsome one releases her arm and presses a phone into her hand. He gestures, Sam raises it to her ear.
“Forgive me if I seemed callous.”
Felix sounds unconvincingly sheepish, the voice of someone forced to apologize. Sam glances at the Koreans. Her tongue is thick from fatigue and she has to swallow twice before answering.