The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “My what?”

  “You did it once,” Shan-yun said helpfully, “they figure you’ll do it again, given half a chance.”

  “Oh. Gotcha.”

  “– you are to be taken to a place of correction where your unsavoury personality will be expunged and replaced by one more to our taste.”

  “No! No! Not the scrub, you fiends!”

  Ignoring every outburst, the Bug extended a small document featuring a really rather flattering three-dimensional picture of Turdington Jimbo with some of his friends at a take-out Japanese Nooky bar. No text was visible, firstly because by 197 years from now nobody (other than intransigent recidivists like Hsai Shan-yun) could read, and secondly because robot Rugs see mainly at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.

  “You are to surrender this notification of intent to the officiating medic. Heavy penalties will attend unauthorized folding, bending, spindling, or mutilation of the card. Kindly follow me.”

  The machine spun majestically and rolled slowly away into the brightly lighted corridor.

  Since one of its metal tentacles was firmly attached to the shrieking man’s arm, Turdington Jimbo skidded across the foul, dank, slippery cell floor, kicking and banging with his spare arm.

  The wall started back down again, with the clear intention of resealing Hsia Shan-yun inside the cell.

  “Hold it, buster!” Outrage and disbelief made her own voice squeak. She hurled herself forward without waiting for that refreshing cortico-thalamic integration pause recommended by leading mental health authorities.

  What you are about to witness is unadulterated thalamus at work. Brute beast.

  Shan-yun rolled bruisingly into the corridor a split second before the wall blasted down into its groove with a crash that rocked the Bug on its tracks.

  “Take your tentacles off him, you tin retard!”

  The Bug spun about with dazzling speed, incidentally jerking Turdington Jimbo off his feet and slamming him against the corridor wall, which at least was smoother of surface than the cell’s barbarous bluestone.

  “Ex-citizen Hsia Shan-yun,” it cried in a particularly official tone, training a scanner at her, “I discern that you are at liberty without lawful authorization. Have you taken leave of your senses? Return to your cell at once.”

  The bluestone wall at Shan-Yun’s back screeched back up again into the roof.

  Shan glanced over her shoulder. The cell looked even less inviting than it had when she was pent up in it. She waited for the robot monitor to activate its spigots.

  Watch closely, for we have come in this pivotal and revealing moment to one of the intrinsic limitations of artificial minds: They are easily scandalized. Some courses of action simply strike robot monitors as beyond the bounds of probability. I mean, would you leave your cell without proper authorization?

  The Bug sat there humming, patiently waiting for Hsia Shan-yun to trot obediently back into durance vile.

  The astonishingly tall, ugly, powerful woman again took advantage of this epistemologico-ethical programming flaw without conscious thought.

  Robots have no thalamus, which might be why in the 1,482,965 worlds in the local arm of the Milky Way known to possess life, only one (Alpha Grommett) is governed exclusively by machine intelligences. Even that exceptional case can be explained, since it is now known that all mechanical life on Alpha Grommet evolved from an autonomic mousetrap discarded on the radiation-hot planet by a visiting Bargleplod seven million years ago.

  Doubled over to reduce her profile, Shan-yun sprinted past the Bug and pelted up the stark white hallway.

  With an efficient whine the monitor reversed, started after her.

  Shan-yun dug her heels in, skidded to a stop, caromed off a wall, and headed back the way she’d come.

  As her thalamus had hoped, the monitor had let Turdington Jimbo loose before it came after her. It could hardly hare off in pursuit with a living human person attached only by one arm, for though monitors had a disagreeable amount of discretion and no high regard for organic life systems per se, assault and battery was not part of their charter.

  As a matter of fact, Hsia Shan-yun was betting her life on the truism, never to her knowledge publicly tested, that robots had an express prohibition against irreparably killing a human being built into their core chip.

  She was almost upon it when it fired its cloud of goo.

  The stuff passed over her head, for at that very moment her thalamus had caused her to somersault forward, throwing her directly in the path of the monitor’s heavy treads.

  “Hsia!” the male screamed, hands pressed hard against his bloodless cheeks. “Oh, no! You’ll be killed so badly they won’t be able to fix you!”

  Of course, the robot had jammed on its brakes the moment it worked out what was what, which as you can imagine happened pretty fast, given the niftiness of today’s Moore’s Law-accelerated chips and extrapolating forward 197 years from that.

  Even so, it had acted too late. The Bug was right on top of her. It did the only thing left to it. It lifted its entire torso into the air on its telescoping wheelbase, like something out of Inspector Gadget.

  Hsia Shan-yun’s thalamus was not working blind in precipitating this chain of events, because she had seen robots perform the same stunt to clear unexpected obstacles when moving at high speed. (I thought you’d like to be reassured that there was nothing gratuitous or ad hoc in her methods.)

  She made herself snake-thin, or as close to it as a woman designed like Shan-yun could manage, by tightening her rib cage.

  Treads clanked and banged and thundered past on either side.

  She reached up convulsively and clamped her arms and legs to its underbelly, then clung on for dear life.

  All manner of knobs and levers festooned the Bug’s belly. Chortling merrily, Shan pressed, pulled and tampered with as many as she was able to reach with one hand, clinging the while to her haven. The monitor could hardly shoot goo at her while she stayed in this position, but the depressing possibility remained that it might drop back down to normal profile and sandwich her across the floor.

  A very bad noise went through her body then, like the bell of the Hunchback of Notre Dame being put through a suitably sized garden mulcher. This was followed by an equally abrupt ghastly silence.

  The Bug stopped with a jolt.

  Hsia Shan-yun fell off, banging her spine.

  Somewhere farther up the corridor, the breeding male was venting strange muffled sobs. Shan rolled up her eyes, sighed, shook her head, eased out from under the motionless machine, and sat up to blow her nose.

  Turdington Jimbo was not weeping with terror, as she had supposed. He sat in the middle of the corridor doubled up with mirth.

  He was trying to hide his unseemly mirth behind his hand. When Shan-yun scowled bitterly, he only laughed the harder, shaking his own head in explanation and apology and gesturing for her to look behind her.

  The monitor’s twenty-seven utility tentacles stuck straight out from its torso like the quills on a porcupine. Its lights were off.

  She’d killed it stone dead and turned it into a pincushion.

  “Hsia,” the man began.

  “Call me Shan.” To her amazement and almost without waiting to notify her brain, the stomach cramp of terror switched to a top-class pulse of sexual excitement.

  “Turdington Jimbo,” the breeding male said, covering his chest gallantly with his outspread hand.

  “Hi. That’s not –?”

  “That’s Jimbo.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Turdington Jimbo’s eyes were shiny with the lust of the reprieved. The erogenous zones of them both were inflamed, engorged, and highly visible. They were employing a form of signaling evolved by human people back in the days of Australopithecus boisei but hardly ever used to full advantage any longer because of the widespread custom of wearing clothes over most of them.

  Instead of falling into an absent-minded fit of procreation, though, Sh
an-yun ran to his side, grabbed his hand, pulled him to his feet. “Up, man. We’ve got to move fast.”

  “Don’t be a spoilsport,” Turdington Jimbo said sulkily. “Let’s tango. Let’s get it on. We could be big, really big. Let’s talk this over. I know a great place where some actors go after the show, we could eat, maybe take a bottle of Chianti, or the house white’s fine if you’d rather try something different, dance a little –”

  Shan-yun slapped him hard about the chops. He staggered, touched his bleeding lip, shook his dazed head, averted his gaze.

  “Sorry. You know how it is. I’d just like it to be the last thing I remember before they burn my brain out.” He sat down again on the hard white synthetic flooring and started to cry.

  At that moment the lights went out and the entire wall at the far end of the corridor lit up with the huge face of a gray-haired bureaucrat.

  As enormous lips moved, an amplified voice like planks of wood being slammed over and over against the sides of your head told them:

  “Do not make the slightest move! Nerve crunchers are trained on you both from every side. You will never escape!”

  “Run, Jimbo!” Hsia Shan-yun cried. Hand in hand, lust and self-pity momentarily displaced from the centre of their attention, they sprinted toward the huge projected face.

  With a really awful teeth-grating whine, the nerve cruncher came on.

  Hsia Shan-yun and Turdington Jimbo instantly crashed to the floor, while utmost agony knotted every muscle in their bodies into a macramé of incandescent thermite wire.

  “Release the prisoner.”

  Hsia Shan-yun battled her way free of the lashing coils of boiling pain and sat up, looking blurrily at the gray face that loomed over her from the holovision screen. Its huge lips pursed in distaste.

  “You cannot escape, Ms Hsia. Mr Turdington, to your feet, if you please.”

  Strangely unhurt, Turdington Jimbo climbed sheepishly to his feet and began to back away from his twitching companion.

  “Sorry, babe. I know we could’ve swung, you dig? If we’d met in more propitious, like, you know . . . Love your glands, kiddo, no shit.”

  Shan-yun stared from the magnified image to the scuttling breeder and back again. She shook her head, which still felt as if it were connected to her neck by hot wire and staples.

  “Ms Hsia, I am your doctor. This psychodrama has confirmed beyond any doubt the analysis of obdurate deviation produced by the computers during your interrogation.”

  “What! You lying maniac, I haven’t been interrogated! I only just woke up in that filthy cell –”

  “The questioning was conducted while you were unconscious, naturally. This was praiseworthy efficiency, since the techbots had to anaesthetize you in any case to recover the Striped Hole you had secreted about your person.”

  Turdington Jimbo continued to skulk furtively down the corridor. Hsia stared at him with slowly dawning understanding.

  “Jimbo! Is this prick telling me that you –”

  “Just doing my job, honeyroll,” he screeched. She was almost on him in one convulsive arm-swinging vengeful leap when part of the corridor wall bubbled, irised, put out a tentacle, and pulled him through, legs kicking in wild alarm.

  The huge gray mouth in the screen pursed, sighed. “You see? Utterly uncontrolled. You are a pitiful atavism, Ms Hsia, a genetic error that we must set right.”

  Shan glared wildly up and down the corridor, prying at the walls and flooring with her strong fingers. The bubble was gone, sealed over. She was trapped, pinned down by the doctor’s eyes, at their merciless mercy. Shan-yun’s skin seemed rigid, her muscles shimmered, she seemed to feel every nerve picked out in blue and red and crackling with electricity. She looked like a wild beast with an IQ of 150.

  “It is beyond the power of 23rd-century mental hygiene conditioning to cure you. I have only one recourse left to me. You are to be taken from this place and –”

  “Brainscrubbed!” The word burst like blood from her mouth.

  “Certainly not! Do you take us for savages?”

  Shan’s lips did that rictus which cheap pulp writers describe as a mirthless smile. It’s certainly true that she didn’t have much to chuckle about right at that moment.

  “ ‘Brainscrub,’ so-called, is merely a convenient fiction, serving as a public deterrent to deviation. We are not monsters, despite the detestable claims of your twisted philosophy.”

  “Your robot Bug said –”

  “The KS-749 unit was programmed for the psychodrama that tested your fidelity to the State. Allow me to continue. You leave us no alternative but Hyperspatial Morphology Restructuring.”

  You must have noticed the aggravating way bureaucrats and politicians love to simplify the genuinely difficult, handing out their jackass Golden Fleece Awards to people whose imagination and powers of thought leave the jackasses limping badly in the rear of the van of history, while inflating the commonplace with their orotund bombast.

  In ordinary terms, what Hsia Shan-yun’s doctor had in mind for her amounted to amputation of most of her limbs, surgical removal of all those items of her anatomy that distinguished her from her drab fellows, blurring of the eye’s cornea to reduce her visual acuity, drugging and numbing of her mind, and in general changing her from the mind-crackingly ugly creature she was into a standard wimp of the 23rd century.

  “When your physical state has been ortho-retro-fitted, you are to be taken to the Pacific Zone starport and from there removed to a place of permanent exile from the Earth, namely the Prison World ZRL-25591.

  “In the company of other confirmed deviants you will live out what remains of your life in the perpetual absence of those advantages and regulations of civilization which you find so irksome. Judgment has been rendered.”

  The man’s face dwindled to a single point of light and, then even that faded. The corridor lights went out, leaving Hsia Shan-yun in total darkness. There was a hiss of gas. It didn’t make any difference to Shan. Even when you’re in a state of hyper-arousal, ready to fight and die, red in tooth and claw, thalamus and cortex locked into synch, some prospects are simply too tacky to face while you’re awake.

  Having all your major bits trimmed off to fit you on the Procrustean bed is an example of one such challenge.

  Even as the gas eddied into the corridor, Hsia Shan-yun was already out cold as a mackerel.

  If you ever find them coming at you with a Hyperspatial Morphology Restructurator, I can only advise you to run as fast as your legs can carry you in the opposite direction.

  While you’re running, search your pockets for a cyanide capsule.

  If you find one, place it between your teeth and crunch down hard. With any luck, you should be dead inside a couple of minutes and beyond their reach.

  Hsia Shan-yun was not that lucky.

  She awoke stiff and sore. When she ran her hand over her aching face, nothing fit.

  There are no makeup mirrors in a space-hulk, but after her eyes finally came as close to focusing as anyone can reasonably expect eyes to do when they’ve just had their corneas hyper-spatially scratched out, she saw at once that the surgeons had really earned their fees while she was blotto.

  Her legs were now slightly less than half their previous length, and effectively clubbed at the ends.

  Shaking, she raised her hands in front of her weakened eyes.

  Claws. Bird claws. Shrivelled, enfeebled things, the hands of a woman of 122.

  Hsia Shan-yun moaned and tried to push herself to a standing position.

  Every part of her body was out of whack. She tottered backwards, unbalanced.

  When she looked down, a gust of shocked grief burst through her. Her breasts were gone. Under the rough convict sack, her chest was flat as a normal attractive 23rd-century woman’s.

  Shan-yun started to cry. She slid woozily down to the metal deck and hunched there, puny arms folded over her poor depleted flesh. She sobbed with loss, then with growing anger, and fin
ally with great noisy howls of furious defiance.

  “Attention! Attention! We are now in orbit about Prison World ZRL-25591.”

  The throbbing in her head was not helped by the speaker blaring in her left ear. She covered the sides of her mutilated face with the mean little hands they’d left her, but the voice cut through like a surgeon’s scalpel.

  “Prepare for immediate disembarkation. When the doors open, leave your cells. Follow the green line to the shuttle pod. Attention!”

  Howling with rage, Shan-yun shoved herself off the cold, damp metal plating and waited shivering for the snick of the door’s lock. She was starvingly hungry. Her breath stank as it bounced back to her from the scratched, graffiti-covered door.

  The door grated open. She burst out into the gangway and slammed into a surly woman with swarthy skin. Bristling, Shan raised her hands angrily.

  And stopped.

  Her entire physical relationship to the rest of the human world had turned on its head.

  The other woman was centimeters taller than she, and tough with it.

  Hsia Shan-yun dropped her hands and croaked, “You a fellow felon?”

  The other woman lowered her own fists and frowned. “Freda Odell,” she said. “ ‘Felon’ is right. I was caught programming the teaching machines with subversive material.”

  Shan-yun was impressed. “Wormhole theory?”

  “Nah. History.”

  They smiled and hugged each other with spontaneous warmth.

  “Move along! No loitering!”

  A green arrowhead flashed imperiously along the scarred metal bulkhead. Shrugging, the women followed it to the shuttle pod.

  Seven other sociopaths were already there, looking lost. Nobody was speaking to anyone else until Shan and Freda arrived, and they’d hardly begun to liven the party with introductions and outbursts of grievance when another PA system started up.

  “Enter the shuttle in orderly procession! Strap in at once for immediate re-entry. Hurry it up. A nerve-crunching for the tardy!”

  “In a pig’s eye!” Her moment of rational humility firmly behind her, Shan-yun started along a side corridor looking for someone to kill with her feeble new hands. Worried, Freda lingered at the entrance. The rest filed in obediently.