‘LGM?’
Alex is thinking of the white room—she zapped him for sure. His brain crawls under his skull.
Milena is eager to explain. ‘Little Green Men. You know, like flying saucers. Right brain visions. There’s one strain, the Streiber, that gives you a complete abduction experience, even with fuzzy false memories of rape. It’s amazing what you can pack down inside a bunch of metal-doped superconducting buckyballs.’
‘Klaata barada nikto,’ Alex says, and isn’t surprised to see that she doesn’t get it. She’s probably the intense serious type who listens to Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier if she listens to anything at all, and hasn’t watched a single movie in her life. He says, ‘But it isn’t as if they do anything permanent, is it?’
‘Not yet. I made a Universal Phage that gets rid of any fembots, not only those in your blood but also any bound to your neurones or their synaptic junctions. The company loved that when I threw it to them. I have to give them something occasionally, so I can do my real work. You’re following this?’
‘I do know something about the fembots. But it seems like…cheating. And crude.’
The little girl laughs, ‘You’re so old-fashioned. Oh, I’m not making fun of you! It’s really quite delightful.’
Alex says doggedly, ‘But you need me.’
‘One day I’ll be able to design fembots that can do everything. I’ll make assemblers that will set up factories within liver cells and manufacture the hormones for sexual maturity, and the effector fembots needed to increase neuronal connectivity. But at the moment the changes fembots make must be chemically supplemented.’
‘You could simply use gene therapy to insert the DNA to make the hormones.’
The little girl, Milena, is suddenly serious. She says, ‘Gene therapy will be part of the package, but it’s slow, and the makeover has to be as catastrophic as a phase change to take permanently. It isn’t easy, Alex. The people who make the dolls have worked hard to make sure that their design can’t be subverted. But they made a fundamental error: they used point deletions to neuter the dolls. The breeding stock from which they harvest gametes are simply the base models. What’s been taken out of the neutered dolls can be put back. Then there’s the question of sex change. Did you know that most dolls sold are fundamentally male? I was lucky to get hold of any females, but in fact that’s a minor consideration.’
Alex leans across the table. ‘This isn’t about making dolls into sex toys, is it?’
‘Of course it is, but that’s the easy part. I want to show you something. It’s neat. You’ll have to pay the bill. I’m too young for a credit card, and I don’t like carrying cash around at this time of night.’
Milena leads Alex through the neon brawl of nighttime Soho to a comic book shop. The bored, middle-aged skinhead at the cash register waves them through a curtain of dangling plastic strips, and Alex follows Milena up a flight of uncarpeted stairs lit by a bare fluorescent tube.
‘There are places like this all through Soho,’ Milena says. ‘But there are few places like Dr Luther’s. He specializes.’
There is a long corridor floored with cracked linoleum, which creaks under Alex’s feet. He suddenly feels his clumsy weight; he’s like a doomed bull following this little girl, bemused and befuddled, to the slaughter. They pass doors with panes of frosted glass that bear, in faded gilt lettering, the names of vanished import/export companies, personal finance advisors, and dubious aromatherapy and ‘mind relaxation’ parlours.
There’s a light behind one of the doors at the end of the corridor. Milena raps lightly on the door’s glass pane, and it is opened by a tall, slightly stooped man who ushers them inside. The room is bare except for a few plastic stacking chairs and a metal-framed desk with an ancient keyboard computer on it. A half-open door leads into an inner room tiled from floor to ceiling, white tiles that gleam under a wash of lights. Alex thinks he knows what’s behind that door. He wants to see it, and yet he doesn’t.
‘Dr Dieter Luther,’ Milena says. ‘He makes what you might call living sex toys.’
‘You may call them that, but I would not,’ Dr Luther says.
Dr Luther is in his late forties, and has a cadaverous yet handsome face, like that of an aging alcoholic actor. He wears a green doctor’s gown fastened down the back, and disposable latex gloves. The gloves squeak and rustle as he clasps his hands under his chin and gives Alex a cold, appraising stare.
‘Dr Luther supplies several houses of ill-repute,’ Milena says. ‘His work is held in wide regard.’
She is matter-of-fact about this, a very demure little girl calmly explaining commerce in the worst kind of sex.
Dr Luther allows himself a small smile. ‘There are a number of cognoscenti who depend on my services, some of them, fortunately, high-placed. I am, you understand, not an independent operator, but who is, these days?’
Milena says, ‘You will be one day, Dieter, I know it.’
Dr Luther lights a cigarette, draws on it with a nourish, then holds it up by his neck, its filter pinched delicately between thumb and forefinger. He says, ‘I do have plans, it is true. Amsterdam is very liberal, very understanding. Here, more and more, there are these so-called morality laws. Well, young man, you know how it is. You are a kind of artist also, I understand.’
‘I suppose so,’ Alex admits.
‘Dr Luther is employed by Billy Rock’s family,’ Milena says.
Alex looks at Dr Luther, who returns his gaze with a faint, amused smile. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’m not trying to tell you anything,’ Milena says. ‘I’m letting you learn. You take from it what you will.’
‘Milena is testing you,’ Dr Luther says. ‘It’s how she gets her fun. Such a bright little girl, and so easily bored.’
His smile has grown by a millimetre. It is not a nice smile. It seems to imply that Dr Luther can look into Alex’s soul, and is not impressed by what he sees there.
Milena says, ‘That’s not true!’
Dr Luther says to Alex, ‘Ah, but she is a bright young thing, don’t you think? Quite unique. She gave me much help with modifications to the control chip.’
‘You were doing fine without me.’
‘Milena, sweetheart, while some customers are quite content with, let us say, quiescent partners, there are many more who prefer a reaction to their actions.
‘Milena,’ Dr Luther tells Alex, ‘showed me how to reprogram the chip. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I am rather busy…There is such a high turnover, you understand.’
‘You change dolls into sex toys,’ Alex says. He wants to get this over with. Sweat prickles across his scalp.
‘In here,’ Milena says, and takes Alex by the hand. Her skin is cold and dry. She leads him into the white-tiled room, where something lies on a steel table under a rack of brilliant lights.
It is like a bald, blue-skinned child. It is a doll. It looks like it is wearing a green bandage above a red loincloth, but then Alex registers the sweet smell and sees blood dripping from a corner of the table into a white plastic bucket. The green bandage on its chest is a cloth on which stainless steel surgical instruments are laid out.
‘Nothing interesting,’ Dr Luther says. ‘Just a standard vaginal reconstruction, the kind that would fulfil a transvestite’s deepest wish. Dolls have a cloaca, you understand, like the birds you wear so colourfully, Mr Sharkey. From the point of view of most customers it is not a satisfactory entrance. Do look, please, if it interests you.’
‘You expected me to throw up or faint,’ Alex says to Milena. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
‘My,’ Dr Luther says, ‘such anger, and so sudden. My hat is off to you, Milena. Perhaps he’d like to stay, while I carve this thing a new asshole.’
Then Alex is stumbling along the corridor, and Milena is calling after him. He almost falls down the stairs, and the customers browsing the racks of comics give him startled looks as he rushes past. Outside, at the gutte
r, he gives up macerated cheesecake and pizza in a smooth rush. He spits and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. The night’s heat is like a tight bandage on his forehead.
Behind him, Milena says, ‘I won’t apologize for Dr Luther. He’s necessary.’
Alex turns.
Milena faces him with cool defiance, with a poise beyond her years. She says, ‘If you want to know why I need him, you’d better come with me. Or you can go home and wait for Billy Rock or Doggy Dog to close your end of the deal.’
She walks away, and after a moment Alex follows her. She says, without looking around, ‘Dr Luther customizes dolls by giving them vaginas, or by constructing other, more novel orifices. Some of his customers have very strange tastes.’
Alex says, ‘Dr Luther is as strange as anyone I’d care to meet.’
‘He’s very intelligent, and he’s also a borderline psychopath. I think that the surgery is the only thing that keeps him on the level. But he has a regular supply of dolls, and he allows me to experiment on their control chips, in return, of course, for knowledge. He allowed me to visit with you because I told him you’d supply the right cocktail of hormones to give them secondary sexual characteristics, fat under the skin, real breasts, that kind of thing. He has plans to open his own brothel. At the moment, he is simply a supplier.’
‘Doggy Dog doesn’t know about this, does he?’
‘He really is very stupid. Delbert, although he works hard at it, is no brighter. They have no conception at all of the extent of the business interests of Billy Rock’s family.’
‘What happens to the dolls? The ones Dr Luther modifies.’
At last, Milena turns to face Alex. They are standing at the western end of Gerrard Street, by the gate into Chinatown. The knife fighters and the crowd have gone, leaving only a patch of blood-soaked sawdust.
Milena says, ‘The dolls are used up. The clients that Dr Luther caters for really do have very special interests. You’re shocked. Do you need to know anything else?’
‘Why are you doing this?’
Milena strikes an attitude. Flickering light from the nearby gaming arcade turns her white skin blue. ‘To set them free. You want Utopia? I can take you there. The elements of the new age are all around us, and I’m drawing them together. Some must suffer so others are free, but it’s not as if the dolls are human. Nor will they be, because I’ll make them more than that. Are you with me or not?’
Alex knows then that they are bound together, by blood and by the thirst for knowledge. He knows why she chose him, and knows that he is lost. Of course, she could have done something to him to make him feel this way, in the lost hours after he rang her doorbell, but the thought is only a flicker, gone. It doesn’t matter.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ Milena says. She yawns, as quick and oblivious as a cat. ‘I have to go home now.’
‘I’ll walk you there.’
‘It isn’t necessary. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. I’m being watched.’
‘By Doggy Dog?’
‘By my company. They don’t trust me. They think I’m working on enhancing doll control systems. The control chips that make dolls do what they are needed to do, that simulate intelligence. Dear Alex, if only they knew!’
‘Who are you, Milena?’
‘I’m something new, like the dolls. My company made me, you might say, although it doesn’t yet know quite what it has. I’m smarter than they know, and I plan to live forever. How far along are you with the synthesis?’
‘Another day and I can give you all you’ll need. The bacteria are growing. The next stage is to harvest and purify their product.’
‘That’s good,’ Milena says, ‘because we might not have much longer than that. Don’t follow me,’ she adds, and walks away, disappearing amongst people strolling past the brightly lit plate glass windows of the restaurants of Chinatown.
12 – Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise
Ray Aziz tells Alex, ‘You look like shit, man. I’m saying that in the most friendly way, of course.’
‘I’ve been up all night.’
It is noon, the next day. Alex has just made his delivery of HyperGhost. He suspects that he’ll soon need all the cash he can lay his hands on.
‘Let me get you something,’ Ray says. ‘On the house. Really.’
‘Water will be fine. Really.’
Ray laughs. ‘Well, we have ten different kinds. The kids get thirsty.’
‘Whatever. But nothing flavoured.’
Ray walks around the freeform steel counter of the bar. Ground Zero looks dusty and bleak in the daylight that leaks through half-open shutters. Sound and lighting rigs hang like giant black insect chrysalises over a row of crashed cars inhabited by tumbled, blood-spattered test dummies, heat-stained concrete walls with the shadows of vaporized people, slicks of puddled glass that dot the floor.
Ray hands Alex a blue bottle shaped like a miniature dumbbell. Alex plucks out the slice of lime which Ray has wedged in the bottle’s neck before taking a long swallow.
He really has been up all night. Harvesting the modified oestradiols and thyropic hormone excreted by his genetically modified bacteria. Running tests. The chromatography system is purifying the hormones now, and by the end of the day he should have more than fifty grams of product. He should feel relaxed, but instead he feels an intense foreboding, a kind of unfocused dread intensified by the post-apocalyptic décor of Ground Zero.
When Ray asks if he’s OK, Alex says, ‘I’ve never seen the club like this, in the daylight.’
Ray nods. ‘It really is spooky when you don’t have VR enhancement…Kind of dead without the firestorms and the groundbursts, huh? Let’s go outside, man, sit in the shade a while.’
‘I should get going. There’s just one thing—’
‘Come on, sitting down for a moment won’t hurt. You know I’m supplying my best VJ for Billy Rock’s thing tonight?’
‘Really?’
‘For this new thing of his, the Killing Fields.’
‘I thought you were straight, Ray.’
‘I’m a paper millionaire, but I work in this funny area, at the cutting edge of culture.’
‘I heard you say that on Capital Radio a few months ago.’
Ray shrugs. ‘What I didn’t say then is that occasionally I have to put up with assholes like Billy Rock. I shouldn’t complain. I mean, I was invited to the party.’
They sit in the shade of the concrete platform that used to be a loading dock, back when the long, steel-framed building was a warehouse supermarket. Ray squats on his haunches, a fifty-year-old pixie in tight black cycling shorts and a baggy T-shirt printed with a Holzerism, Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise. His grey hair is done in a braid that hangs halfway down his back.
Alex asks, ‘Are you going?’
‘Don’t count on it.’ Ray pauses, then adds, ‘I hear you’re in trouble with Billy Rock.’
Alex takes a sip of water. ‘I’m sort of helping him out. Something to do with this Killing Fields thing, actually.’
Ray looks off into the distance. All around the old warehouse, on what used to be the parking lot, are rows and rows of old cars waiting their turn to be crushed and recycled. Across a sleeve of water, a STOL fanjet is manoeuvring away from the terminal of London Airport, wavering in and out of focus in the waves of heat that ripple across the expanse of concrete.
Eventually, Ray says, ‘Word is that Billy Rock is moving up. There are some heavy dudes coming in to catch a demonstration of that thing he’s building across the river.’
‘The Killing Fields arena.’
‘You know, Kubrick made that Vietnam movie of his around here. Put in artificial palm trees, made it look like Vietnam.’ Ray laughs. ‘He should have waited thirty years, man, for the world to catch up with where he was at. I hear Billy Rock has Michelle Rocha working for him.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Alex doesn’t want to appear not to know who Michelle Rocha is
.
‘You catch the ambient sets she did for Mao and Me? Prima numero uno weirdness. Billy Rock’s getting slick. Moving up, like I said. Power finds its own level.’
Alex thinks about the phone message that was waiting for him when he got back from the strange, unsettling meeting with the little girl, Milena. Howard Perse saying that he had to call back no matter what the time. And when Alex did, Perse was drunk, and raving about some huge conspiracy.
Alex tells Ray, ‘I don’t think it’s really Billy Rock. It’s really his family, but they can’t show their hand because Billy Rock’s the number one son. He can’t be allowed to lose face, so it has to look as if he’s in charge.’
Perse had said something like that. Connections were being made, further up. A scenario in which dolls were actually killed in for-real combat games was ideal counter-propaganda to the arguments of that weird alliance of militant Christians, Muslims and animal rights activists who were, for their different reasons, trying to get doll labour banned.
‘I’m being leaned on,’ Perse had said. He looked worse than Alex felt. Although it was past midnight, he was still in the Drug Squad’s operations room. He stubbed out a cigarette in a plastic cup at the blurry edge of the phone’s field of vision, lit another with his Zippo. ‘There’s heavy stuff going down, and you’re seen as expendable.’
‘You got me into this with this fucking vendetta of yours. And now you’re just going to drop it?’
‘Look,’ Perse said, with the grave intensity of the very drunk, ‘all I know is that this Killing Fields thing of Billy’s is coming out into the open. That party he told you about, turns out it’s been planned for weeks. Half of London’s glitterati will be there. Even a Cabinet minister. You think I can walk in and arrest the little shit with weight like that backing him up?’
‘You’re fucked, Perse.’
Perse pulled back from the camera, grim and dishevelled. ‘We’ll see, Sharkey. I still have one or two options, but you’ll have to watch your fat arse from now on.’
Fairyland Page 9
