The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  Then there were none.

  They came up to a rotting alley. It swirled with flakes of skin and dust, the light breaking through in little shafts.

  “Right around here,” said Gorman.

  “Where? There?” said Venadrik, pointing at the alley, the buildings on either side of it covered with purple sores.

  “Yeah, in there. Everyone’s gotta do it. Everyone goes to the Doll Garden. Then you’re one of us for good.”

  The other kids were smiling. He wasn’t sure. He saw an explosion of black sixes. But it was all right. If this was what he needed to do, then he’d do it.

  He started walking. The alley stank horribly and he could hear the buildings gasping. The smell filled his nose, overwhelmed him. He pinched his nostrils. It was hard to breathe. He retched but managed to keep the bile back. He didn’t want to throw up in front of them. His eyes started to water. His skin felt itchy but he didn’t want to scratch.

  It was getting darker the further he got. He saw a little opening on the left and he slowed down. He turned and Gorman motioned for him to go inside. He stepped carefully around the corner and looked.

  In front of him he saw the tiny garden, wedged into a dead space in the building’s rotting walls, the flesh hanging in ragged strips. Spikes shot up from the long grass that had run wild in the space. Skewered on the spikes were dolls, their faces mauled by rain and soot and mud, their eyes hanging loose.

  They looked like his poor lost Reese.

  His mother must have told them about her. She must have. He started crying.

  The little dolls wriggled like they were trying to get free, like they were in agony. The screamed out to him. He ran towards them wanting to free them, to save them. His mind exploded under the stress with dark hallucinations, babies in the mud and snakes and roaches crawling on him. His feet were slick and he tripped and tumbled, falling face first into slimy water. When he got to his feet he looked up and felt a sudden and terrifying stab of dread. Nobody was waiting for him at the end of the alley. They’d left him alone in the city.

  “Gorman?” he called out.

  Nobody answered. He started yanking dolls off the spikes. He pulled and pulled at them. One of the spikes sliced into his hand. The blood gushed. He grabbed his hand.

  “Gorman. Anyone? Help.”

  He couldn’t save the dolls. They were all ruined. He grabbed one with purple hair like his Reese and ran through the fetid air and dashed out of the alley. He looked around wildly. He didn’t see anyone. The city looked like it could come alive and strangle him.

  “Where are you guys?”

  He already knew in his heart. They’d left him.

  He tried to remember the right away to go, to get back to the Tangle station, but his mind was fuzzy and he was still seeing pulsing flashes of colors and images like ghosts. He couldn’t remember. He held onto the doll. It was still screaming. He’d been a baby and scared and stupid and that’s why he hadn’t been paying attention and now he was in trouble.

  He started in one direction but stopped. He turned around and tried another, but it seemed wrong too. He just didn’t know where to go. He could feel the anger swelling up inside him, filling his mind. They’d left him. He would hurt them. He would make them understand what happened when they lied to him. His mom was right about friends.

  He started running. He didn’t know where he was going so he just ran until he couldn’t run anymore, his vision a blur.

  He sat down in despair, cradling the doll. It had gone quiet finally. His vision filled with horrible things, translucent bodies burning in the sky, worms crawling through empty eye sockets, melting skin, scorpions glowing in the dark. People passed by, their teeth like daggers, their eyes like fire. He knew the crazy things wouldn’t stop because he was scared. Whenever he was scared, the horrible visions attacked him relentlessly.

  He cried openly, his face in his hands. After a bit the visions started to die down and he saw a long shadow standing over him. He looked up and saw a tall man.

  “Are you all right, kid?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  For some reason Venadrik wasn’t afraid. The man knelt down a little and Venadrik could see he had a strong, angular face. It was beautiful to him, almost as if illuminated. Soft sevens scrolled around his head like the halos on the Deos saints in his mother’s sensenets. The man had bright, clear eyes and big arms. He wore a dark leather jacket that flowed down past his waist.

  “What’re you doing out here all by yourself? You ok?”

  “I—”

  He wanted to say his friends left him, but he was ashamed. He let his head drop.

  “Hey, it’s all right. I’m a police officer.”

  He turned his hand over and a bright badge flared over his palm. It was beautiful to Venadrik, its shapes perfect and rounded and filled with light.

  “Do you know where you live?” said the police officer.

  Venadrik looked up. He was afraid to say he didn’t know, because he didn’t want to look stupid. The officer seemed to read his mind.

  “Hey, don’t worry. It can be confusing out here. It’s all right to be confused sometimes. I can’t always remember stuff without help, you know? We all need help sometimes. This your doll? What happened to her?”

  “She’s not mine. I found her. She was afraid.”

  “Well she’s safe now because of you.”

  Venadrik looked at the battered doll and felt good about himself for once.

  The officer waved his hand over Venadrik’s face with a calm, gentle motion.

  “Salaris Venadrik? All right. I see where you live. Come on. I can get you back.”

  Venadrik looked up and felt hopeful.

  “I thought I might just be stupid—”

  He immediately regretted saying that. He dug his fingers into his arm to remind himself not to say stupid stuff.

  “Hey, never mind that. Look up here. Like I said, I ain’t so smart sometimes myself. It’s all right. Let’s get you back to your folks. You live with your mom right?”

  “Yes.”

  The officer held out his big hand and helped Venadrik up. Venadrik felt safe for once. He’d never met a real police officer. His mom said they were bad.

  Venadrik took a chance now. “What it’s like?”

  The man looked down at him, his facing shining brightly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Being…a…police officer?”

  The man rubbed his bristled face a little, thinking about it. Then he said, “On a day like today, a pretty good thing. Maybe the best job a guy could have.”

  Venadrik smiled big. He thought then that being a police officer might just be the most important job in the whole world.

  The Tyranny of Heaven

  2407 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5105 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Ox

  Edgelands Ghettos, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  He stood watching her.

  The sixteen year old Venadrik wanted to savor everything: the smell of dirt and roach droppings; the claustrophobic air that never circulated because windows stayed stubbornly shut “to keep out the filth”; the evening sun dying, sinking into the black sea; the sickly light and the ceaseless creaking of her rocking chair.

  He took a deep, deep breath and smiled. He drank in the sadness and sickness of her life.

  “How will you take your punishment, momma?” he said.

  She couldn’t hear him. He’d timed it just right, so that she was out, plugged into her Bible, already down and lost in the hideous hallucinations, her eyes white and rolled back, a thin river of drool running from her mouth.

  She still used an old-fashioned cranial jack, the kind that got infected easily, the kind that filled with dust and dirt and filth. No one used them anymore, but she did. She sat in her rocking chair, clutching the tiny reality projector, one of its edges ridged to fit her
boney fingers. It had a small, well-worn, red leather wrist-strap that kept it in place as her hand went slack and she plunged deeper into the visual illusions.

  “To think you once terrorized me,” he said and laughed.

  To him she now looked like an insect or any one of the rodents and cats and dogs he’d flayed and watched writhing in the dirt. She was old beyond her years. In this time when everyone was young again, her staunch stance against age resetting and relifeing made her look even older.

  You’re just a poor, old bitch who loves the prison behind your eyes. To think you once controlled me, you useless old whore.

  He touched the flesh of his inner arms, to remember. Watching her now, as a hawk watches an unsuspecting rabbit from on high, he felt utterly calm and detached, as if outside of himself. He could see himself standing there, shoulders loose, legs and arms crossed, leaning against the door.

  “I am not stupid, momma. You are.”

  To think he once cowered beneath the hideous visions that false Bible projected into his mind, as she sat him down again and again for Bible time. Her reality once swallowed the whole universe. His former blindness and weakness sickened him.

  “Today, everything is purged. Today everything is burned clean,” he said softly.

  It wasn’t until later in school that he learned his Bible was a disgusting aberration. He remembered that day so well. His Comparative Religion class had just finished going through the ancient religions, like Christianity and Islam and Hinduism, and now they’d gotten to the modern ones, like Deoism and Intuitism.

  He remembered his teacher droning on that day. He’d barely been paying attention, but he remembered every word now.

  “By the mid-2200s, it was common for people to record their lives with nanonets, thoughts, feelings — what they saw, everything, second by second. But few people recorded their lives as exhaustively as the Prophet Amadeo. From his earliest years, he recorded his whole life. Imagine if the Christians could’ve seen Christ’s Passion through his own eyes or if the Buddhists could’ve experienced the Buddha’s epiphany under the banyan tree for themselves? The Deos faithful do just that. That’s what made it one of the most popular religions on all the fifteen major starship settlements and Big Forty planets in only a few decades.

  “In just a short time, Deoism confined ancient religions like Christianity and Islam to the pages of mythology texts. People like to think that religions last forever, that theirs is the one true faith, but even the longest ones have only lasted a few thousand years.”

  She’d stretched out her arms. “Humans haven’t even been around that long. If we think of the entire history of the Earth as the distance between my two arms, we could wipe out all of human history with a single flick of a nail file.”

  She’d showed the class an unedited Deos Bible then. Venadrik had long since grown numb to the horrors his mom had made him watch over and over again so he wasn’t afraid. But as he slipped into the orthodox visions, the original visions, he couldn’t understand why the parts he’d come to hate and loathe were missing. Where were the Black Plains, where the wicked suffered endlessly, tortured and slaughtered again and again with no hope for an end to their anguish, with no hope for a second death? Where were the translucent bodies burning in the sky? They were gone.

  In a fever, he searched wildly for a missing vision, one he knew well, skipping through 150 years of the Prophet’s life in time lapse. It wasn’t there. He looked for others he knew. Not there either.

  He flicked the visions off and stood up, dizzy, his head swimming. He had to leave the room. He could hear his teacher as if from down a tunnel. He ripped open the door and rushed outside into the fresh air. Rage consumed him like a gasoline fire.

  It was right then that he knew that people were miserable, hateful, horrible, that they could and would corrupt anything. It was right then that he swore no one will ever have power over me ever again.

  Nothing was his equal. Nothing deserved his praise. Nothing deserved his reverence.

  He ran from the school yard, ran fast and far, ran all the way down to the shining sea.

  “Today, I am my own God,” he roared to the naked beach.

  Now, back in the small living room, standing there, watching his mother, he could hear his own excited breath as if amplified a hundred times. Hate burned in him like a dark sun.

  My blood is acid. My face is fire.

  “Do you feel me, mother? Somewhere? A faint tremor? An unspoken fear? Something hidden that can come from any direction?”

  He remembered that missing scene from her pervert’s Bible. He closed his eyes and saw it in his mind. A great Beast raged through an unprotected Heaven, with sixteen arms and razor wings, with a hundred hungry mouths, open, insatiable, gorging on Angels, its trillion all-seeing eyes open, so nothing could surprise it, its three tails swinging wildly, smashing and collapsing the golden towers of light that stretched up forever and ever. It slashed at the marauding hordes of angels and they fell from the sky, slaughtered, shattered. They streamed from the Heavens, a cascade of golden bodies.

  The pathetic sister-fucking editors hadn’t even had the creativity to be original, cribbing their cobbled-together visions from the ancient Christian Bible. To think the scene had once haunted him, once kept him awake, in terror, night after night.

  He opened his hate-hazed eyes.

  “Now I am the Beast set free,” he said.

  He blinked a series of commands at the reality projector in her hand. He’d already formatted it with an older firmware and altered the dates so no one could tell. The older firmware had weaknesses. With the proper sequence of commands its firewall broke down and exposed its energy settings, energy settings that should never be altered for reasons he was about to demonstrate to his mother.

  He flashed the last command and the first shock hit her. Her body shook and convulsed like a woman on fire. He watched calmly, watched the pain searing through her. She couldn’t disconnect. It was as if her hand had melted around the little reality projector.

  Slowly he walked towards her, never looking away, his eyes drinking in her death.

  Her eyes opened suddenly and he knew she was trapped in a strange purgatory, seeing the world around her and the Bible’s visions at the same time. She couldn’t wake up. She couldn’t scream because her mouth had filled with foam.

  He was standing over her now. He crouched down to look in her eyes, looking deep, watching her writhe and twist.

  “There, momma. Stay still a moment.”

  He grabbed her face with a gloved hand and held it steady, while her body shook crazily and her bowels broke down and she pissed and shit herself.

  “Let me see. Let me see you suffer. Let me look into your hideous eyes, that show nothing, that see nothing,” he said to her softly, through gritted teeth. “Now look closely as your life burns away. Look into my eyes. Die as you lived.”

  He held her face tightly, staring at her the whole time, forcing her to look on her son’s face as he slaughtered her, slowly.

  “Look into my eyes and see the true nature of God.”

  Frenzied

  2458 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon

  The Farm, One Police Plaza, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  Hoskin watched the stream from that night in the ship graveyard over and over. They more he watched, the more convinced he was that he’d just seen it wrong, that they’d come to kill Sakura, not him. The girl needed his help, and he’d tossed her back out into the hungry streets.

  She couldn’t go back to the Willows now. Only one way to find her. Hoskin had Quinlin put out a call to CityGrid, the meta-personality behind the millions of cameras, big and small, splashed around the city. The grid could track down almost anyone, all except the powerful who could afford to buy invisibility.

  “Grid’s got her,” flashed Quinlin.

  �
�Where?” flashed Hoskin.

  “Goin’ into a small strip club in the Southern Lights.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  “One thing though—“

  “Yeah?”

  “Grid couldn’t find her for a bit and then she kind of —appeared.”

  “Whadda ya mean?”

  “It’s like she....I don’t know…like she wanted to be found.”

  “All right.”

  “Walk softly, man.”

  “Roger that.”

  Quinlin grinned on his innervision. “I could go with ya. You might need some help in there.”

  Hoskin blinked the channel closed.

  ***

  The slashing rain in the Southern Lights sliced into Hoskin as soon as he stepped out of his hovercar. He flicked on a halo that beat back the rain, but he still felt the mist. The rain hit the streets and ricocheted back at the sky. He looked around. Strip clubs and automatic food joints stretched all the way down the block, spewing neon into the dark.

  Two holograms of hot strippers beckoned him inside the Dangerous Bodies strip club, giggling and laughing. Hoskin ignored them. This was the place the grid had spotted Sakura going into.

  The incessant rain had ripped off huge chunks of the building’s flesh and eroded the rest. The skinned building’s electromuscle underlayer peeked through everywhere. In the spots where the rain had stripped away the muscle’s coating, it sparked, the sparks instantly vaporized by the water.

  He opened his hand and showed his badge to the security screen. It scanned the badge with a spray of pink light and then the carbon fiber doors split open. He went in.

  “Have fun, honey,” chimed the holograms behind him. “Don’t be too naughty.”

  The place looked bigger on the inside. A clash of competing music hit him. Everywhere men sat in circles, staring up at the women dancing in columns of soft pink light. Under their surgically inserted heels the light platforms flickered.

  Hoskin scanned the club for signs of the girl, but didn’t see her yet. His backbrain came alive and ran pattern matches against whoever he saw.