Sweet Justice

by Gaiman, Neil

  22 JUNE 2109

  I was right. Yesterday was really boring.

  Forewarned by my flash I tried to avoid the Elephant Man (otherwise known as Ned Kamen) all morning. I saw his eyes, his cold patient eyes like black pebbles set in blancmange, following me around, waiting for the moment when he could trap me. I was hoping yesterday morning’s flash was incorrect; I’m not infallible.

  I’d successfully dodged him for about an hour when Omar, head of Psi Division, passed by. I told him about my flash concerning the Philosophy riot, on Zeitgeist Boulevard.

  ‘Okay, Anderson. Log it with Kamen and then get moving.’

  Trying to avoid a precog can be like sliding slow-motion downhill in a car without brakes. As quickly as possible, I gave the flash to Blubber Boy – but his blubber belied his agility. Before I could exit, he’d cut off my escape route.

  ‘Anderson,’ he breathed, ‘When are we going to have that dinner?’

  ‘What dinner, Kamen?’

  The smell of distant mudflats had reached my nostrils. I pushed past him, and felt a clammy claw crawl onto my shoulder.

  ‘The dinner you’re going to cook me round your place, of course.’

  ‘Do you know what I like about you, Ned?’

  Ned looked at me with wide eyes, his lip muscles flexing into something resembling a smile.

  ‘No. What do you like about me, Anderson?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied, bringing up my right knee.

  I hadn’t wanted to report him for hassling me – Psi Division is understaffed as it is – but enough is enough, right?

  Well, during all this excitement, I’d forgotten about my locker. By the time I got there it was noon, and the cupboard was bare. Security knew nothing about it; they said they hadn’t seen anyone but me go near the locker all day.

  The next time those guys call themselves security I’m going to sue them under the old Trade Description Act.

  My philosophy flash was pretty accurate. Actually, it was disaffected Pragmatists, not Hedonists, who teamed up with the Existentialists, but who’s counting?

  As for today, I see yet another snarl-up en route to H.Q.; I see Ned Kamen, after a brief trip to Med Bay, putting in for a transfer to Mutant Control Division, where he will feel more at home; I see a few petty crimes that I’ll log, and I see myself walking into an exclusive uptown apartment and shooting a businessman’s head off.

  Hold on. Look at that again, Anderson. Grud, that’s heavy. I just walk straight into his room, lift my Lawgiver, and pebble-dash the wall with his frontal lobes.

  Now it’s going a bit hazy, like looking through a dirty window. I see myself, walking... walking a little strangely. I go up to this man, another businessman I think, in another uptown apartment. What am I going to do? Shoot him too? He puts something onto the table. A case. He opens the case. Inside the case is a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money. I shut the case, shake the man’s hand, and I walk out of the room with the money.

  ‘Nice job, Anderson,’ says the man. Am I going crazy? Am I a killer? Or am I both?

  What I mean is, do I have another side to my personality? Beneath this good-natured, highly cultivated, mild-mannered exterior does there lurk a Judge Hyde character? And if there does, can she please go live somewhere else?

  Let’s try and piece this thing together. I have a flash about emptying a guy’s cranium of all its grey matter. But during the day, I have no conscious awareness that I’m doing such a thing. That’s the truth. As far as I’m concerned, I did not shoot that man. But that man was shot. Oh yes. Took me hours to piece the flash together, but finally I located the address where the ‘killing’ was to happen. Only I arrived too late. There was a Lawgiver lying on the floor. I picked up the gun and at that moment some other residents came into the room, just like a corny old vid where the hero picks up the bloodied knife and is holding it over the bloodied corpse as the screaming witnesses appear.

  ‘See anyone enter the building in the last five minutes?’ I asked. The residents shrugged their shoulders and looked bored. Seeing a Judge shoot down a perp in Mega-City One is no big deal I guess.

  ‘Only you, Judge. Only you.’

  Weirder and weirder. I went to the armoury with the Lawgiver that shot the businessman. Seems it was one I called for – personally – a few hours before the homicide. So. I had the gun that shot the man, I was the only person the other residents saw going into the businessman’s apartment, and I had a flash in which I saw myself divorcing his cerebral cortex from his spine. Doesn’t take a genius to work out who shot him, does it, Anderson? You’re flipping out, girl.

  Or else...

  Let’s concentrate on today. A few magazine-sellers hacked to an inch of their lives on Geller Strasse; illegal Scottish coffee-drinking party at the Loch Ness Cafe. Small time. Ignore it. Look harder. Ah, there I am. I’m walking into a club, a low-grade joint called Slimelight. I’m going up to the owner. He’s smiling, not because he knows me but because I’m a Judge, as I lift my Lawgiver and point it at his face. A second later he has nothing left to smile with.

  Not exactly following Judge procedure there, Anderson.

  What next? Ned Kamen will eat his lunch opposite me. Forget it. Forget Kamen, Anderson. You’re getting confused. There I am. Walking in the business sector. I open the door to an office. I see Kamen dribbling spaghetti down his chin.

  No! Concentrate. I walk into the office, up to a man sitting behind a desk. It’s the same man I saw earlier, the one who gave me the case of money. Now he gives me another case. Of money.

  Back to H.Q., Kaman’s been denied transfer request to Mutant Control, probably on the grounds of not being pretty enough. Hell. Look harder, Anderson. Don’t get side-tracked. There I am. I’m at my locker, putting something into my locker, locking the door to my locker, leaving my locker.

  So what’s in my locker?

  24 JUNE 2109

  Money, of course. Money I’d been paid for scratching the businessman and the club owner. The owner of Slimelight had been found dead that morning. I don’t remember getting out of bed and doing it, but who can say?

  It’s well-documented that people can have split personalities, the left hand doing what the right hand doesn’t know about, so to speak. I’ve never thought I could be one of those people, but then I suppose no-one ever does. Logically speaking, Psis should be good candidates for mental shenanigans, being as they are like highly-strung thoroughbred racehorses. It’s scary, though, to think that part of me might be this monster, shooting people and getting paid for it, and knowing that as a Judge I’d be able to go where I liked and no-one would ask questions.

  It got to the stage during the day when I really thought I was going crazy. Maybe I should pack it all in, report to Psycho Tube, and spend the rest of my days playing Napoleon in a straight-jacket. But I won’t because I think, hey, I’m Judge Anderson: I’m capable of beating anything. Ego, I know. And when a Judge’s ego overshadows their ability for rational, objective reasoning, they’re in trouble.

  And so I decided not to tell Omar about all this, not just yet. Of course, it wouldn’t be long before the authorities started taking a closer look at me, and if they found those creds in my locker I’d be in a radiation zone without a rad cloak, if you know what I mean. But, well, something was telling me to hold on, and in my line of business you learn to listen to your little voices.

  As for today, I’m going to spend it in a Flash-Cube, a nice quiet place where Psis go to let their thoughts run free without distraction. At the moment my mind is like a thick soup; but there’s too much gravy and not enough meat.

  Hold it. Now I see myself getting somewhere. I see myself running from the Flash-Cube and contacting Omar. I see a word. No, some letters. LDP. I see myself at the end of the day, smiling.

  But now I can see myself lying on the floor, bleeding.

  You’re getting confused again, Anderson. Don’t you think it’s a little unlikely that you’ll end the day smili
ng and bleeding? In my book, those two phenomena have always been mutually incompatible.

  And what’s this? Oh, I see myself writing this diary, tomorrow morning (as you know I work on an old-fashioned word-processor, i.e. you). I’m writing away when suddenly the old machine breaks down. Again, if the previous evening I’ve been spread-eagled on the floor and pumping out my life’s blood, it’s unlikely that I’ll be Dear Diarying.

  Hmm. Maybe I’d better get to work. I’ve a feeling there’s a long hard day ahead of me, and this is getting nowhere.

  25 JUNE 2109

  I was sitting in the Flash-Cube, just trying to clear my mind of all the rubbish (Kamen, snarl-ups, Philosophers, that sort of thing), when a picture of myself began to form. Oh, oh, I thought. Another killing. I was walking through a kind of mist, though in real life this wasn’t mist; my mind’s eye just wasn’t focussing properly. I tried to get a tab on a time or a place but couldn’t so I looked closer at myself. Was this me or was this the monster that dwelt within me? I looked closer still. A gust of wind lifted my hair a few inches from the nape of my neck, and there it was. So small only a magnifying glass, or a Psi, would have spotted it. LDP. And then I remembered what LDP stood for and I knew what was happening.

  I must have been crazy to think I was actually going crazy.

  I reported to Omar. Gave him the whole thing – my flashes, the killings, the money in my locker. Within the hour a prisoner had been taken from his Iso-Cube and was being interviewed by Judges. I was on my way with two other Judges to an address in Pravda Mansions. The man being interviewed was a plastic surgeon whom I’d been instrumental in putting away a few years back.

  He called himself Leonardo da Peckham, and like most artists he signed his work with his initials.

  Pravda Mansions is such a tough area that even the rats go round in pairs. I had two Judges as back-up, and we all warily entered the run-down residence of Leonardo’s daughter, Mona. Mona was the only member of Leonardo’s family who had not been slung behind bars.

  Scattered on the table I saw some of the stuff that had been taken from my locker. As I was looking at it a floorboard creaked behind me. I turned, gun at the ready, but saw nothing there... just a bookcase with no books, an old chair, a full-length mirror. I relaxed.

  And then the full-length mirror started shooting.

  I fell to the ground, rolled, came up, fired. I am trained to do this without thinking. Someone shoots at you and you switch to automatic pilot, which is a lot quicker than manual control.

  Mona lay on the floor. I say Mona, but really she was me. That was the creepiest moment I ever had; shooting your own double and then looking at her, dead at your feet. I bent down, studied the features I knew so well, the blemishes, the intricate contours of the nose, the eyes, the ears. It was perfect. Even then it was hard to believe that this really wasn’t me. And then a crazy thought flashed through my head. What if this is Anderson?

  What if I really am Mona?

  That way, as they say, madness lies.

  This, then, is the story: three of Leonardo’s sons had gone loco in the Cubes and were now confined to the psycho tubes, with intelligence ratings slightly lower than a well-cooked cabbage. So when Leonardo escaped about four months ago he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to get his own back on me; he wanted to drive me crazy. To that end he operated on his daughter, Mona. Then he gave himself up, knowing that no perp on the run can last for long.

  Four months later Mona’s scars had healed, and she started working on me. She stole the things from my locker so that I would be psychically linked to what she was wearing and carrying. My mind would travel to them, and once there my mind would accept Mona as myself. She used her likeness to me to get the gun, to plant the money in my locker, and to get into the right places to kill those people. And it was all working out fine. I’d started to believe I was cracking up, started to wonder if a beast lurked within me. And then just one little mistake caught them out.

  The problem was, Mona was Leonardo’s masterpiece. He excelled himself, it was possibly the greatest piece of flesh sculpture the world had ever seen, and Leonardo’s ego simply could not resist signing it.

  An ego that overshadows rational, objective thought might be dangerous in a Judge, but luckily for us it’s just as troublesome for a perp.

  What else is there? Oh yeah... The creep who gave Mona the hit money in my flashes was actually an out-of-work actor she’d hired. His next appearance will be in the Cubes, and it’ll probably run and run for about thirty years. The money in the flashes was what Mona stole from the people she shot.

  By the way, the hackings on Geller Strasse were cleared up; the illegal coffee drinkers escaped; Kamen is suing the department for unfair dismissal; but it looks as though my flash got it wrong when it said my old word processor would break down. I’ve been writing on it all morning and it’s working just fi

  RADICAL CHEEK

  By Peter Milligan, Law in Order: Judge Dredd Annual 1990

  ‘Okay, Max,’ snarled Judge Dredd, grabbing me roughly by the umbrella. ‘I’m pulling you and all the Normals in.’

  ‘Hey, Dreddio!’ I said. ‘Don’t blow my zeal with that zany spiel. This is my big day! This is the day of the Max Normal Mega-City Fashion Show! Rest the jest, Man. I mean, take a dive with that jive and let a cool cat stay alive!’

  Hey, listen. Maybe I should start at the beginning. That’s the normal thing to do, is it not? I’m Max Normal. I’m the King of Kool, the chap with the rap, and I’d arrived at one of my MAX NORMAL BOUTIQUES only to see that Dredd and some of the other Judges were already there. All my staff and a flare of Normal shoppers were either lined up against a wall or being thrown into Crim-Wagons. Was this a nightmare or was this a nightmare? Later that day I was going to have my biggest fashion bash yet, the Max Normal Mega-City Fashion Show, featuring a new line of thirty-inch flared pin-striped suits, with matching handkerchiefs and bowler hats, all the fab gear it takes to make a Norm top of the form, and here was Dredd laying down some krazy karma, saying how he was going to throw my hide inside a Crim-Cube. Get ye behind me, mindblower!

  ‘For old times’ sakes, Dredd baby,’ I said. ‘Give me the rundown on what’s come down. Give Max the facts.’

  As you know, old Dredd has got a soft spot for Maxie. It’s a soft spot about two inches below the solar plexus, and this is where he hit me, with his elbow.

  ‘Not this time, Normal. Your followers are a public menace.’

  I hit the ground. But I hit it with style. They don’t call me the Sheik of Chic for nothing. They wouldn’t call me the Sultan of Soigné if I couldn’t take a little blow down below.

  ‘Freeze out, Daddy. Just give me a sign of what’s in line. Maybe I can give the long arm of the law a hand!’

  Dredd pulled me to my feet and dragged me away from the boutique, then he threw me against a wall and pushed his face so close to mine I could see my reflection in his visor. My reflection looked as good as ever. It’s nice to know you can still count on some things.

  ‘Okay, Normal,’ grunted Dredd, without moving his lips. ‘I’ll give you one chance. Overnight there has been an outbreak of criminal activity by Max Normal fashion followers. Bank jobs, muggings, vandalism; you name it, those punks have done it all. All the Normalite punks are wearing your clothes, Normal. They’re your followers. If you don’t clean it up in five hours, I’m closing down your boutiques and making the possession of flared trousers a criminal offence.’

  With that, Dredd elbowed me once more for luck in that soft spot beneath my solar plexus and sped off on his bike. If it weren’t for his dress sense, that Judge would be a mile of style.

  So this was the score with the law. Some renegade Normals were causing a stir and if I didn’t want to end up in stir myself I had to get to the bottom of it and come out on top. The future of flared trousers rested in my hands. I had five hours to stop my cool crown slipping. I had five hours to save the Max Normal Mega-City Fashion Show
. I knew, in the name of everything pin-striped, that I couldn’t afford to lose.

  So I lost no time in going round the boutiques and fashion stores. I flashed the cash, I didn’t stifle the rifle, I laid the creds on all the heads in the know, trying to clue in on any new blood that was buying the Normal line of menswear.

  Now, one thing you chucks and chicks should know about the fashion world is that it’s a jungle. It’s full of gangsters, crooks, protection rackets, pay-offs, lay-offs, day-offs and corruption. In other words, the fashion game is the same as everything else in Mega-City One.

  And while I myself looked for a clue as to what was new I kept asking myself a question or two: why should there suddenly be an outbreak of lawlessness by cats in bowler hats? By guys in striped ties? By dregs in flared pegs?

  I had no luck with the Normal cats and kitties. No-one knew a thing. No-one could tell why dedicated followers of Max Normal had suddenly turned into crazy law-breaking dudes.

  I decided to visit the high guru of the mean fashion scene: Old Man Ross. The old man is crazier than a three-eyed Cyclops, and you can’t just chat cat to cat with him: he insists on putting you in front of an old camera and interviewing you. But I was running out of ideas and running out of time. If I didn’t get a lead soon I’d lose my fashion show, and the world would be sentenced to a fate worse than drainpipe trousers.