The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin Smith

  It was a cloudless day, bright blue sky but fresh and windy. She had her leather zipped up tight, her hat pulled down over her ears. She took another sip from the mug of hot sweet tea.

  This would be okay, this would be enough, she thought. Time for a change. She wanted to get away from Bradford and live by the sea. Stay away from the clubs, the bouncing and all the violence. Live in a place where not everyone knew you and your business.

  The work was menial and repetitive but that didn’t matter. When she was finished she could see a clean floor, or an oiled ride, or a happy punter, well more or less, and could measure what she’d done.

  She would have to go back and tell her dad face to face what had happened first. It would devastate him and he already needed care, but he had made his choice. He had made it clear that he didn’t want her around, that he blamed her for something, though she’d never known what.

  She heard his huffing breath as he shuffled towards her a long time before he said anything.

  ‘I’m not paying you to eye up the Isle of Wight,’ Ted said sternly.

  ‘I’ve done all the floors in the arcade and the caff before it opened. I helped Jimmy with the ghost train and I’ve worked the tombola all morning. I was just having a quick tea break.’ When she turned around, however, Ted was smiling.

  ‘I know. I know when people work and when they slack. I know everything. It’s the rides themselves – they talk to me. I’m like a fairground shaman,’ he said. Beth was smiling, trying not to laugh and shaking her head.

  ‘You’re so full of shit.’

  It was Ted’s turn to laugh. With difficulty he manoeuvred himself onto the sea wall and offered her a cigarette. She was about to take one when she realised that she didn’t smoke and didn’t need them to buy stuff and trade for favours any more.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The sea,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t that the Solent?’

  ‘Have I ever told you about my time in the merchant marine?’

  ‘It’s my first day,’ Beth protested. Ted’s chuckle was a rasping wet noise that threatened to become a cough. ‘You shouldn’t smoke so much.’ Or eat all the shit you obviously do. He had the look of someone who had a full English breakfast every day of the week.

  ‘This is what a real man looks like,’ Ted said, slapping his belly. It was avoidance but Beth had to grin. ‘I heard you had some trouble this morning?’

  ‘Just some kids trying to tip one of the machines.’

  ‘Little shits.’

  ‘Nah, I was worse when I was their age. Just bored and skint. I don’t like those tracksuits they all wear though.’

  When she looked back up she saw that Ted was studying her intently. Beth wasn’t sure why. Ted had worked the amusements for many years. When punters came to the stalls he had learned how to read them. He knew people. Beth didn’t realise it, but how she responded to kids was a test. She didn’t hate them or resent them, she just saw them for what they were.

  ‘Lot of people try hard their first day, their first week, their first month and then slack off.’

  Beth shrugged. ‘You don’t think I’m working hard enough, just fire me.’

  ‘You keep this up you can stay as long as you like,’ Ted told her and pulled out his wallet. He took a fifty out of it. Beth started to protest. ‘I told you I won’t have desperate people working for me. It comes out of your pay, but it’ll tide you over until the end of the week. Understand?’

  ‘Thanks.’ She finished her tea and Ted watched her head back towards the amusements.

  He hung in the murk, the particulate matter floating all around. He could not imagine how once he had thought that this was not a good place to come. He did not feel the coldness now. He did not care about the lack of visibility. He did not need to see her to know that she was there. He could hear her sleeping song calling to her lost daughter somewhere in the city he and the others had forsaken. Lost for generations but so close.

  He was but a child to her. A servant. The daughter would bring freedom. The daughter could wake her. The water felt warm, quiet and subdued like the womb. Everything was loud, painful and so dry on the land, in the city. In the city every street was a reminder, fragmenting memories played out like an old film. They might as well have belonged to someone else. On dry land it felt like you could reach up and touch reality, pierce through it like a membrane to where madness and hate waited.

  He swam down. He would do his duty, but first he needed to touch her, be with her, join with her, and inside her he would try to cease to exist so there was only her.

  Heavily sedated and on as much pain relief as he was, Arbogast couldn’t stop the tear trickling from his eye as he saw McGurk, resplendent in shell suit and bling, the cane, the latest phone in hand, flanked by muscle, making his way through the ward towards him.

  The other patients and the staff watched him walk by. If they didn’t know who he was, then they knew what he was. The constant chewing and the wild amphetamine stare didn’t help.

  McGurk walked into Arbogast’s room and stood at the bottom of the bed, looking at him with contempt. Trevor remained behind McGurk while Markus went and pulled the curtain shut across the window that looked out onto the ward. Then he closed the door.

  McGurk looked down at the bandaged stumps where Arbogast’s fingers used to be and then back to the tear running down the pimp’s face.

  ‘Do you know what I hate most?’ he asked. Arbogast dared not answer. ‘Fucking weakness.’ McGurk moved quickly but with the jerky movements of a habitual speed freak. He grabbed Arbogast’s wounded hand and got up close to the pimp’s face. Over the sterile and sickness smell of the hospital and through the fugue of sedatives and painkillers, Arbogast could smell spearmint over something rancid on McGurk’s breath. McGurk put his hand over Arbogast’s mouth. Arbogast wet himself. He was sure it was over.

  ‘I want to test the limits of modern medicine’s ability to relieve pain,’ McGurk told the pimp. It was something cool to say that he’d thought of on the way over. McGurk squeezed the stumps of Arbogast’s fingers. The dressings turned red. ‘Don’t you cry! Don’t you fucking cry, you bastard! You owe me an explanation.’

  McGurk was wiping his hands with a paper towel when the doctor burst in flanked by security.

  ‘It’s okay. We’re leaving,’ he told them.

  ‘We’ve called the police,’ the doctor told him. McGurk turned to look at the whimpering ball of pain on the bed that used to be William Arbogast.

  ‘He doesn’t want to press charges, but you do what you think is right.’

  Trevor made a path for them through the security and they left.

  ‘You believe that shit?’ Markus asked as they made their way through the ward.

  ‘City’s getting weirder.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to know who the fuckers in the masks are. I don’t want any of the cunt with a gun – he sounds like some super-plod, Special Branch, something like that. Find me where the sister is, though.’

  Caitlin felt like she had bled onto the page today. Sometimes it just wouldn’t come, but today it had been pure stream of consciousness. Poetry wasn’t cool or interesting to most people any more. Caitlin felt it was difficult to do well and with relevance to the modern world, but today line after line had come out of the platinum-nib fountain pen given to her by proud parents and onto the yellow legal pads. She felt like she was talking to something else, listening to the beat of the city or the world, channelling the words. Normally she hated her work immediately after she’d written it. Sometimes it was hard not to tear it all up and burst into tears, but not today. Today she even took pleasure from the shape of the words on the page, wishing she could publish them in her handwriting rather than through some soulless word-processing package. She was the biggest critic of her work. If she liked it then she knew it was good.

  The inspiration had wiped her. The invitation to go out had been half welcomed and
half not. She could do with leaving her flat after such an intense day, seeing some actual people, but she felt drained. The answer had been obvious, a little chemical pick-me-up. After all, she was following a trail blazed by hedonists of all stripes.

  Red-haired and unconventionally attractive, a little too tall for the more insecure male, Caitlin didn’t stop a room when she walked in, but some attention was inevitable. Single, she was keeping an eye open, but she didn’t panic when she was on her own, like some of her friends. Tonight she just wanted to dance but she needed some fuel.

  It was something new. Caitlin was initially suspicious as it looked like an acid tab with a dot of red on it. The girl dealing in the ultraviolet-lit toilets had assured her that although it provided good visuals, it was all about the dancing. Caitlin had let herself be talked into it.

  Dancing. Moving to beat and bass. Trying to find that perfect moment. The modern shamanic experience. The lights above her becoming stars, light refracting through the dry ice becoming glowing gaseous nebula. Dancing on the edge of a spinning spiral galaxy. Joy. This was why she did it. This was the moment. To transcend the club. The music receding. She felt something wet under her eye, coming from her ear. She tasted copper in her mouth. She touched her face. Her fingers came away wet. She looked at the other dancers. They were covered head to foot in blood. Above her, space started to seethe like angry bacteria consuming everything.

  There wasn’t even time to scream.

  Du Bois lay on the bed in his room in Fort Southwick. He liked the room. It was another faceless barracks room. He had felt at home in places like this since he had lived in his first preceptory. His room was part of the officers’ quarters for the contingent of Royal Marines who guarded the facility.

  Fort Southwick was one of the grand Victorian forts built on Portsdown Hill at the behest of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston for an invasion that had never come. The huge, squat, red-brick edifice had been used for Operation Overlord during the Second World War, as a NATO communications centre during the cold war and was now part of the Admiralty Research Establishment.

  He had the information sent to his phone. He could have had the information downloaded straight into his brain, but he preferred to watch and read and then assign data to his augmented memory. He received the information shortly after he had used his phone’s systems to interrogate the control nanites he had found in Arbogast’s blood.

  He hadn’t understood some of the words. Or rather he had understood them but struggled to make sense of how they fitted together. He had learned new terms like RLK, which apparently meant real-life kill. He understood those who killed for belief, profit and pleasure. He didn’t understand insanity, but appreciated it as a motivation. What he didn’t understand was how humanity had become so jaded. Perhaps they deserved their inevitable destruction. He had never felt so old, so divorced from everyone around him, so out of his time.

  They were called the DAYP clan. This stood for Do As You Please. They had taken their name from Carroll. Du Bois was of the opinion they should give it back. He understood their criminality. What he couldn’t understand was how it connected to their games. As if it was all part of a computer simulation and they could do what they wanted to whoever they wanted. As if none of it was real and therefore none of it mattered. How had they become so divorced from reality?

  They had started life as an elitist gaming clan. Something called an uberguild, apparently. It had taken a while for du Bois to realise that the weapons they were dealing were effectively electronic game pieces for computer games and not real weapons. Even longer to realise that people would pay for these virtual weapons and for high-level characters. This was how the fledgling DAYP had financed themselves. Virtual weapons dealing and organised league game E-sports, where they were known for domination and bullying.

  Their first connection to real-world criminality was with a Korean game gang that they contracted out debt collection to. This was also their first connection to offline PKs – player kills.

  According to Control, the DAYP recruited from top-echelon game nerds. The super-intelligent, many of them dropouts from top universities. They were recruited online after the DAYP used gameplay to psychometrically measure them, targeting excluded, disaffected sociopaths capable of doing the sort of things that would be required of them. Recently their games had become more sophisticated and capable of influencing people towards such behaviour.

  It would almost be funny, except that through dealing in experimental software, hacking, upmarket games discovered via industrial espionage and experimental hardware, the DAYP had come across S-tech and L-tech. Worse, they had learned how to utilise it.

  Then the DAYP started seriously hunting for it. They searched the most accurate conspiracy sites, the darkest, dangerous and often most secure parts of the web, looking for info on the tech. Each time they found it, they attempted to replicate it, augment themselves and their technology and then sell it. They were close to controlling the black market in S- and L-tech.

  Their dominance of this black market had required a degree of ruthlessness. Initially, influenced by a type of computer game called a first-person shooter, they had used external contractors to do their dirty work and secure the tech for themselves. These contractors were normally security companies who used ex-special forces personnel. However, with access to such a high level of technology, they had started to augment themselves and do their own dirty work with violent enthusiasm.

  They were implicated in thefts, murders, rape, slavery and numerous other crimes. Du Bois had seen men given licence to do what they wanted before, but they had not been given the power of near-gods on earth. The DAYP were thought to be based in America, though it seemed that some of them at least were operating in Portsmouth and interested in Natalie Luckwicke.

  Du Bois was angry that he had not been briefed on them. Control had told him that his direct experience had made him more useful in dealing with the City of Brass and agents of the Eggshell, though more and more du Bois was starting to believe that the Eggshell was a myth. If they had ever existed they were long gone. It hadn’t been so long ago that the Circle would have never allowed such parasites to get their hands on S- and L-tech. He wished that he had been allowed to deal with these spoilt, evil child fantasists a long time ago.

  He got up, poured himself a healthy measure of Scotch and moved to the window. He leaned against the frame, his face lit up by the harsh sodium lights that illuminated the wet concrete and brick of the base. He could see one of the later buildings that had been added to the military facility. Despite being a typically ugly utilitarian design, there was something of the art deco about it. It reminded him of a film he had seen many years ago about a failed utopia. This thought made him smile humourlessly. Beyond that he could see the lights of the city.

  Did it matter? Yes. What the DAYP did was wrong. He was not a righteous man, not any longer if even a shred of what Hamad had said was true, but even if the Circle was corrupt they were not unnecessarily cruel. There was no pleasure in the suffering of others. Like every animal they did what they had to, to survive. Though it looked like that was over. If the prodigal had been here it looked like she was dead.

  Du Bois took out his own phone. A normal phone. This one wasn’t filled with liquid soft/hardware many iterations in advance of what was thought to be the cutting edge of computer and communications technology. He knew that Control monitored his ‘private’ phone as well. It was more a symbol of separation between his work and what he could only jokingly call a private life.

  He cycled through the few names on his contact list and stared at Alexia’s. He put his thumb over the dial key. His work phone sent the text straight to his internal systems, flagged as very urgent. He narrowed his eyes, his vision magnifying the city below him. He could make out the flashing lights from the emergency-services vehicles.

  Some of her co-workers had told her that the fish and chip shop on Castle Street, just down from the Colonial Arm
s, was the best in the city. Beth had practically run down Elm Grove to Campbell Road, where Uday and Maude’s flat was, to stop the three fish suppers she’d bought from getting too cold.

  It was a funny thing about Portsmouth and Southsea that Beth was coming to realise. Perhaps it was because it was an island and space was limited, but it didn’t seem to be a case of good neighbourhoods and bad neighbourhoods, it wasn’t even a case of good streets and bad streets. It was more good house, bad house. Everyone was mixed in together. Students lived next to ‘nice’ middle-class families, who lived next to drug dealers and other career criminals.

  With a can of one of the better bitters, the fish and chips had tasted amazing to Beth. Uday had looked at the greasy food with some disdain but Maude had teased him until he’d eaten it.

  Both of them had then taken some considerable time to get ready – much to Beth’s amusement. Beth practically had to fight off Maude’s attempt to put make-up on her. The getting-ready process had involved booze from the off-licence on the corner of Outram Road and Victoria Road North, because it was cheaper than drinking in the pub, and a volume war between Maude and Uday’s disparate musical tastes. Beth tended to side more with Maude but only a little.

  Then on to a crowded pub on Albert Road. They had to shout to be heard, and spent the first hour standing up until Beth managed to intimidate some kids off a table, much to Maude’s embarrassment and Uday’s amusement. Several rounds in, Beth had stopped worrying about how much of the money that Ted had given her she was spending and how she didn’t recognise any of the music, and was starting to believe the fiction of normality she was trying to construct.

  Beth was studying the wooden panels on the wall, each filled with pictures of butterfly statues, girls with rabbit heads, VW Beetles . . . They were odd but Beth was slowly coming to the conclusion she liked them. She liked that someone cared enough to take the time to decorate the pub like this. Though she wasn’t sure it justified the price of drinks in the place.