Anno Dracula 1999

by Kim Newman

  Hal didn’t look at her with contempt fear but respect fear. He didn’t have hard eyes. But he had a bionic hand.

  Witnesses would remember that before the neck tattoo, she supposed.

  She decided he was at worst a nuisance.

  ‘Your clothes don’t go with you,’ she said, sheathing Good Night Kiss.

  ‘I know,’ he said, rubbing his neck. ‘I was in disguise as an office worker when I got part-erased. It was a chiropterid. A memory vipe… ah, vampire.’

  He tapped his forehead. Just where a chiropterid would make its teeny hole.

  ‘… and what about…?’

  She pointed to his hand, which he’d tried to hide behind his back. He brought it out to show. It was a smart gadget, sleek and compact – if bigger than a proper hand – with visible lights, cogs and rods.

  ‘This is Lefty. Jun Zero – I – had it installed. I’m not sure why, but it’s helpful three-fifths of the time.’

  ‘Unknown female vampire,’ rasped the hand. ‘Sixty-eight percent likelihood of hostile action against User Jun Zero.’

  Did Hal know the hand used his own voice, scrambled and tweaked? He probably couldn’t hear it that way.

  ‘Don’t be offended,’ Hal told her. ‘Sixty-eight percent is a low threat score by Lefty standards. Most people we’ve run into tonight have been in the nineties and up. The whole world wants Jun Zero dead.’

  ‘Can you blame them?’ she said.

  He looked at her with a stab of concern.

  ‘How bad is it?’ he asked. ‘My rap sheet? Have I, like, trafficked golden lads to Transylvania or blown up Disneyworld? Am I a serial killer?’

  ‘Only technically.’

  ‘That’s a huge comfort – not!’

  For an instant, he – Hal, not Jun Zero – expected her to be amused or impressed.

  ‘That’s gone out of fashion. Girls said not! about ten years ago. Then they stopped. You won’t be able to make not! happen again. They’ll say “1992 called and wants its not! joke back”… until they start saying “1999 called and wants its ‘1992 called…’ joke back”. It’s an evolving language.’

  She could talk. She still didn’t understand the J-girl fuss about wrinkled socks.

  Coming to Japan made her the butt of a raft of ‘1992 called and wants its [whatever] back’ jokes. The country of her birth, for so long her idea of the settled and unchanging past, was now the world’s idea – or nightmare – of the future.

  … 992 called and wants its feudal system back, not that it really went away.

  Back at school, she’d wear wrinkled socks. They’d be out of fashion in Tokyo, but the coming thing at Drearcliff Grange. A fashion trend didn’t catch fire with the girls until the school tried to ban it.

  ‘Thanks for the pointers, Miss Manners. In my head, 1992 is this year. You try having your memory leached and see how au fait you are with next-gen slang. Do people still say “next-gen”?’

  ‘I’ve only heard that once or twice. You’re cutting edge there. People still say “cutting edge”.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t. Brings back recent memories.’

  He rubbed his neck again.

  ‘I’ve so few memories, it’s a shame most are of being attacked, barely surviving, running away, and wondering what the freak is going on.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was insensitive. I also have forgotten much. No, that is wrong. I do not forget, I mislay. Memories sink. Sometimes, a fragment floats to the surface of the pond. I heard what your hand said about this floor. I understand what the Princess has done here.’

  From her rooms, much could be inferred about the Princess Casamassima.

  ‘This is from the Temple of One Thousand Monsters,’ Nezumi said. ‘That is the altar of Yuki-Onna. I’ve memories of her, or someone like her, a woman of the snows… memories as seen through a blizzard, which may be word association because…’

  ‘“Yuki” means “snow”, I know. Jun Zero learned Japanese.’

  She tipped her head to the altar. Ice flowers were arranged in the cold spot.

  She slid one of the screen doors aside. Beyond was metal plate, more like the hull of a ship than the wall of a building. Dragon hide, she supposed.

  ‘The more I find out about Jun Zero, the less I want the memories back,’ said Hal. ‘Happy to take the skills – and he seriously got into shape which I, I admit, didn’t… I doubt this stomach has digested a potato chip in nearly a decade. Dude must have committed to a diet of carrot sticks and steroids. But, whisper it so Lefty doesn’t hear, I’m going right off the idea of Jun Zero’s life. If so many people want him dead, he must have been doing something shitty.’

  Nezumi thought it best not to mention the Zeroid massacres… or Children in Need… or the Carleton Knowles whodunit she never got round to reading after the spoiler spam pinged into her inbox.

  ‘Would User Jun Zero like to hear a list of the charges against him and the authorities who have issued arrest warrants and kill-orders?’

  ‘Honestly, Lefty, not really.’

  ‘The information is available.’

  ‘That’s a good thing to know.’

  He shielded his mouth and said, ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘Is that a way of trying to sneak not! back in through the kitchen door?’

  He laughed. That broke up his face, made him more Hal and less Zero.

  He scratched his scalp. He squashed his hair-spikes and raked them with his fingers.

  She took her travel comb out of her pocket and lent it to him. He tried to reshape the spikes into smoothness, and struggled with tangles. He didn’t force it in case he broke her comb.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said as he passed it back. ‘I can smell burning pants, Nezumi.’

  ‘It’s a smidge better, but you’ll need a stylist to rescue you completely. Are you married to the collar ink?’

  ‘Funk, no. It’s awful. What was Jun Zero thinking?’

  ‘This is Japan. Yakuza get tattoos here.’

  ‘Yes, but good ones, right? Fire dragons and samurai…’

  He noticed her moué at the s-word.

  ‘Not a fan of chanbara eiga, then. I’m surprised, what with your sword.’

  ‘I am not samurai. I am ronin.’

  ‘Masterless, right? I figure I am too. Though Lefty says I have a mystery client, who is totally responsible for dumping me in this mess. I did a dirty deed for Mr or Ms U.N. Owen, then the ratfink set a chiropterid on me.’

  ‘I have a principal. Mr Jeperson.’

  ‘But you act because you choose to, not because you have to. Freelance.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish Jun Zero were more like you and less like him. Does that sound nutso? Coming from Jun Zero?’

  ‘Not so “nutso”. But I am no one to be admired.’

  He smiled honestly now. His impulse was to reassure her, give her a pat on the head, and say she was doing well for someone (a girl!) her age – then remember she wasn’t a warm child but a grown-up viper.

  Patronising indulgence would switch to terror any moment.

  She’d seen that so many times she wasn’t much saddened any more.

  He surprised her by taking a different thought-track. He was over being afraid of her – the subliminal crazy-courage of Jun Zero bubbling up? – and took her as she was. He tried to think of a way of contradicting her that didn’t come across as smarmy.

  She appreciated that.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the less deadly side of Jun Zero?’ he asked. ‘His, ah, personal life. Girlfriends and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I heard he – you – teamed up with Sonja Blaue to break up a groomer-stalker-creeper ring operating under the cover of a Galaxy Quest convention. Sonja Blaue is—’

  ‘I know who Sonja Blaue is,’ he said, grinning with delighted amazement. ‘I have – had – that poster of her on the bike on my dorm wall. Badass babe in the leather jacket and sunglasses. Jun Zero and Sonja Blaue?
That’s… like, incredibly encouraging news. Do you have her number? She’s vampire ronin too, right? You hang out sometimes, have sleepovers? Compare knives and swap make-up tips?’

  ‘I’ve never met her. She has said you’re one of the few warm men she’d kill on sight.’

  ‘Bad breakup, huh? You know, I bet it was my fault. I’ve an itchy, hinky feeling about the way Jun Zero treats people. I don’t think he’s that nice of a guy. I mean, I’m kind of disappointed how I turned out. I guess Sonja Blaue would say that too.’

  ‘Her poster is still popular with teenage boys and some girls.’

  ‘Must be retro now. Leather and sunglasses have gone the way of not!’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. The look is still chic. Timeless.’

  ‘Do all girls dress like you now?’

  ‘At my school, they have to. Many complain about it.’

  ‘I hear you. Because I’m in disguise I don’t know what Jun Zero would really wear.’

  Nezumi looked at Hal from several angles, wondering what would suit him. She had taken couture lessons and enjoyed dressing up the dummies. Hal might pull off a modified murgatroyd look – not as extreme in the velvets and frills department as Mr Jeperson – but sharp, clean-lined tailoring with touches of flamboyance.

  ‘User Jun Zero,’ said Lefty, breaking the mood, ‘hostile actor is in the vicinity. One hundred percent certainty lethal measures will be taken against you. Evasion impossible. Recommend you accept the inevitability of demise. These religious systems are available for your comfort: Acosmism, Animism, Ayyavazhi, Azathoth Worship, Bahá’í…’

  ‘Mute,’ said Hal. Lefty continued flashing and grinding but shut up.

  Nezumi heard a crashing from several passages away.

  She drew her sword and started towards the noise. Hal put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Should you go towards “a hundred percent certainty of lethal measures”?’

  ‘This is a dead-end,’ she said, thinking of the metal wall. ‘There is no other direction.’

  ‘Yeah, but “a hundred percent”?’

  ‘“Taken against you”, Hal. Not me.’

  She held up Good Night Kiss and advanced back through the Princess’s 3D autobiography.

  The noise got louder.

  TAKASHI KAMATA (DRIFT KAIJU)

  DK could no more get out of the driving seat than a centaur could dismount.

  The Armourdillo was bigger, broader and heavier than his preferred wheels, but he could drive anything.

  This was a work-release gig.

  But he would have taken it anyway. For reasons.

  Street racing was all he knew and all he wanted to know.

  It paid.

  DK had a stock portfolio, a private box at the Meiji-Jingu Stadium, and Tokyo real estate holdings. In a four-level underground car park, he kept cars he’d won in tsuiso races. Even unrecognisable wrecks. He loved the smell of his trophy garden – cooked flesh, burned leather, twisted metal, oily concrete, spent gas. He never drove the cars he’d beaten. What would be the point? Losers – or their heirs – handed over keys and pink slips, and their cars were installed in his underground garden.

  Three hundred and fifty-six victories in two years.

  Manfred von Richthofen only put eighty machines down.

  It wasn’t just the speed; it was holding the road. In the turns, the drift.

  Front and rear wheels pointed in opposite directions. The burnout. Friction on the asphalt. The dirt drop. Screech and smoke.

  In the drift, he was somewhere else – a zone beyond.

  The trick was to come back alive, to oversteer but retain control, to alter angles, bend rules of time and space and inertia and momentum. Before he ever drove, he was a maths prodigy. He had always known the zone beyond. He first tried to penetrate it with chalked theorems. Now, he drove there and back.

  He was the Drift Kaiju. A considerable man. A hashiriya superstar. Fan magazines published pin-ups of him and diagrams of his car, the Obscene Machine. Through legal cut-outs and a Cayman Bank, he had sponsorship deals with Blue Label Sprünt, Unwin-Fujikawa Chemical and Oily Maniac Hair Tonic. He was the idoru of racers and fans everywhere. The man to beat, though he could not be beaten.

  There were rockabilly songs about him. ‘DK ganbare… go, go, go…’

  Of course, he was also a criminal.

  There were offers to go legit. But legal racing was for squids.

  The only racing was street racing. Against the best competition, and against the Law.

  So he kept racing and the Law kept busting him.

  He was faster and surer than any cop car, so they used tank traps and choppers. The Law came after him in spider-leg mechas, spurting sticky netting from spinnerets, laying caltrops from ovipositors. Undercovers nabbed him in love hotels. He was fitted with an ankle monitor that shocked him if he broke into a jog-trot. A judge prohibited him from touching a stick shift. He could do hard time for straddling a push-bike. Sponsors paid lawyers and he was back on the street in minutes. Rulings were overturned on technicalities. This was still a free country if you could afford it. His hobble-sock was deactivated and unclipped. Fans gathered outside the court to greet him with gushers of Blue Label and cascades of underwear.

  The Law backed racers to beat him.

  The Moth, the Pterror and the Tri-Kappa.

  He had their cars in his carnage park.

  Government programmes filled cars with weaponry. Bio-implanted vampire drivers were recruited and trained. Just to shut him down. They burned up and out. None could match him in turns. He instinctively compensated for the heatbursts, sound tsunamis and fireballs when competitors didn’t make it to the zone beyond and back.

  If it came to drift, he would be alone in the home stretch – using the nox only for show, crossing the line in a flameburst. He could not be beaten. He could not be stopped.

  But he could be busted. Over and over.

  Fifty million yen in cash was put in front of him in a Samsonite. He was told that it would be his if only he lost. To the Moth, or the Shrimp.

  He could not lose.

  The way some vampires had to count spilled pumpkin seeds, he had to win.

  He turned down money. He turned down Mima from Cham-Cham. He turned down a 1999 Ferat Silver Commendatore. He turned down everything.

  He had to race. He had to win.

  The Law paid Rex Mifune, the legal champion, to go dark and challenge him.

  It wasn’t even close. Rex’s wreck was in the trophy garden. Mifune was in prison. Lawyers and sponsors didn’t turn out for losers.

  There were still challengers. Crews from Korea, China, Los Angeles.

  If he couldn’t be beaten straight and he couldn’t be beaten by cheating, he couldn’t be beaten.

  Gan-ba-re… go, go, go!

  Then, the last time he got busted, he was fitted with an explosive collar and removed to a black site on Higanjima Island. This was the Law, but not as he knew it. Other prisoners in the facility were for-real kaiju. Furano, ‘the Frankenstein Girl’, who killed for replacement body parts she stitched onto herself, and rattled the bars of her cage with four six-fingered hands; Varanit Gorasu, ‘the Indescribable Man’, who represented himself as the spearhead of an alien invasion and demanded to be taken to Earth’s leaders, by whom he meant President Clinton, Prime Minister Obuchi and Michael Jackson; Aki Nijūhachi-gō, a psychic prodigy so dangerous he had to be dissected and kept in separate jars. Even, it was whispered, Jun Zero.

  Colonel Golgotha showed up on Higanjima to make a final offer.

  He would still drive.

  He was not asked to lose. And he would serve, if not his country, then the cause of humanity.

  Golgotha did not smirk at that.

  ‘… and your service will be required for one week. On New Year’s Day, you’ll be free with all charges dropped. This offer will not be repeated. If it is refused, you’ll volunteer for medical experiments. Your hands and feet will be
amputated and replaced with jellyfish. That won’t prevent you using a stick shift or brake pedals. The Key Man believes the tendrils will be more sensitive and versatile than your fingers ever were. However, sadly, subjects of the process report a minor, inconvenient side effect. Extreme motion sickness. Anything above thirty-five miles an hour and you puke your lungs over the steering column. Anything above fifty and your guts will boil over and choke you. So, not a question of race or die… but race and die.’

  DK signed up.

  He supposed he was EarthGuard (the Law!), but Golgotha’s Squad was as unlisted as the Higanjima site. The Black Ocean Society, which DK had thought long since dissolved, owned a wing of the organisation. Gokemidoro, a vampire who talked through a tooth-rimmed anus in his forehead, was Black Ocean’s man. Other EarthGuard brass weren’t in the know. A faction led by Kaname Kuran, a presentably pretty vampire sell-out, thought they were in charge, but Golgotha didn’t report to them. In anticipation of a Kaname purge, the General was preparing a coup. Politics were above DK’s pay grade and of no interest, except he could be terminated if he let anything slip.

  Even members of the squad weren’t cleared to know everything.

  Like Dr Akiba – who was only along to support the cover story.

  That would not be needed now, so neither was the doctor. Golgotha had issued the kill-order. DK had seen to it.

  He held the wheel and breathed. Blood dripped from his glove-barbs onto his leg.

  He felt as if he’d won a race. And Akiba had lost.

  DK never killed anyone, but many died racing him.

  It was up to others to save themselves. The Obscene Machine had claw-hook flails and oil-spray nozzles. Drivers who drew level or hugged exhaust in tsuiso races could expect chassis damage or burning lube on the road.

  He’d only hurt Dr Akiba.

  The crowd killed him.

  The doctor could have saved himself by backing off, just as racers could save themselves by slowing down. Hey, they were going to lose anyway.

  DK thought about the Key Man. Dr Jogoro Komoda.

  When the side effects were controlled, DK would welcome the jellyfish process. The Key Man was another Black Ocean loyalist. His record of body-mods and transhumanist surgery went back to the 1930s. A master of engineered shapeshifting, he pioneered the use of unusual strains of vampire blood to assist human malleability. Dr Komoda was on call for Golgotha’s squad. Caterpillar and Astro-Man benefited from imaginative bio-mechanics generations beyond Furano’s botch jobs. After tonight, DK would volunteer to go under the genius’s knife – perhaps shocking Golgotha, who had thought he was making a threat – and have his nerves wired to plug into the Obscene Machine’s transmission. A new century meant new challengers. Rex Mifune wouldn’t be in prison forever. Bypassing wheels and levers, DK would become a true cyborg, a bio-mech vampire with an engine that burned blood.