Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Now the being’s shy little mouth curved with confusion, dismay. “I can’t accept this from you, Mr. Soko! If its value is as you say...”

  “It is. And you must accept it. If you don’t ...you’ll dishonor me.”

  “But how can I? How can you part with such a thing? So much money...”

  “If I used that money, I would dishonor my father, Mrs. Kee. I have no son to pass the sword along to. Beyond me, I don’t know what fate that sword has. This is the only honorable fate I can think of for it. I want this sword in effect to have been the weapon that killed those men who disgraced you. I want this sword...to protect you.”

  The Waiai lowered her head. She had no eyes from which she could weep, but a strange soft whistling came from her: whether from her mouth or the aperture in her forehead, he couldn’t tell.

  “You do me great honor, Mr. Kee,” she told him. “ I accept your gift.”

  Kee rose and extended his hand to her, so that he might take her now as he’d promised. He could have taken the sword to this dealer in rare artifacts himself, simply brought her the money, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

  Though she didn’t need him to guide her, she gave him her hand as she stood. “Thank you,” she said, her smile quivering.

  “I thank you, Mrs. Kee,” Soko told her, giving a short, sharp bow—as was the custom of his people.

  DISSECTING THE SOUL

  Madhur Jhabvala couldn’t sleep, so she padded barefoot into her kitchenette, made a cup of tea, then sat at her home work station in her comfortable men’s pajamas to begin dissection of the brain of the executed prisoner.

  The brain currently resided in a tank of violet fluid in the forensics lab of Precinct 2...from Maddie’s apartment, a ten minute ride by hovercar through Paxton—an Earth-founded colony called Punktown by its citizens. In order to gain access to the police lab, she had to have her image and voice scanned over her vidphone. This done, she uttered a few passwords to enter her specific point of interest. Now, her primary and several lesser screens were filled with data and a view of the mass murderer’s brain in its burbling aquarium. It looked like some mysterious and inscrutable animal dreaming on the bottom, clenching its secrets in swirled convolutions like a nest of tightly coiled tentacles.

  Her glossy black hair was still disheveled from bed, her dark eyes heavy-lidded. So was the vertical eye in the center of her forehead. Though she was of Indian descent, however, this Bindi had only cosmetic significance to her and was no more a cultural expression than the bright blue shade she had colored her hair while in college. A female co-worker had teased her that the eye Bindi, being vertical, looked like a vagina in her head. Maddie had joked back that this vagina gave birth to her thoughts.

  Having given the date and time, Maddie made further dictations to her computer as she initiated the process of scan dissection. The secondary displays showed the scanner’s color-coded three dimensional cross-sections and exploded views with a kind of giddy violence. As she spoke, she used a mouse to guide the insertion of a delicate probe into the reposing creature. Following the probe’s progress, the primary screen revealed a greatly enlarged interior view of the organ.

  Judging from this man’s behavior, it might prove a diseased organ. As a pathologist, she more often examined the other organs of the body to determine cause of death. Only now, she was seeking out what had caused this organ’s owner to bring about the death of others. In a case like that of the Waiai who had shot five youths for raping his wife, and whose brain she had examined after he was killed in the prison exercise yard, the reason for murderous behavior was so obvious that her efforts seemed superfluous. Sometimes she found tumors, defects subtle or great...and other times the specimen was as perfect as if genetically engineered. But the crimes might be just as horrifying either way...and the punishment meted out might be just as harsh whether the cause for the murderer’s actions be somatic or psychological. Certainly, no greatly handicapped person would be executed. But this man’s acts had been so heinous that Maddie doubted that any tumor or abnormality would have lessened the sentence, had its presence been known in advance. And the man had in fact been offered a brain scan while still alive, in case there was indeed a physical flaw that might make him seem less in control of himself, more sympathetic to a jury. He had emphatically refused a brain scan, however, and the law protected him from having one imposed upon him. While alive. Similarly, he had refused the truth scan which would have made for a quick trial and kept a jury out of the process. But a jury had had to determine the truth, and they had also determined that this blood-soaked creature must not be allowed to live.

  “Subject is Peter Maxwell Wegener,” Maddie recited blandly, directing the mouse with her right hand, tapping the occasional key with her left. “Executed by lethal injection on seven point twenty point forty-four. The encephalon has been removed, prepped and sustained in amniotic bath.” She sipped her tea, then lit up a black-papered herb cigarette. “Thus far, no indications of anomalous features via scan dissection. I am commencing a probe to activate and intercept the subject’s memories, so as to record data relevant to his crimes.” In a less clinical tone she murmured, “Not to mention I just like sticking a long pointy thing in this sick bastard’s brain.”

  Here, Maddie paused in her work, sat back a bit and blew smoke past the monitor. She wished she had put more lights on in the apartment before she settled down at her work area. On her main screen, she was going to be watching murder take place right before her eyes, or rather right before the eyes of Peter Maxwell Wegener. She had seen such things before, of course. She had also been beaten more than once by her ex-husband. It hadn’t become any less unpleasant with repetition.

  She had never met Wegener while he was alive. Her introduction to him had involved the opening of his skull. She had thought, however, that he was very good looking for a confessed serial killer, and that he needn’t have forced women to have sex with him, and then killed them so as to silence them. It wasn’t necessary. But he had wanted it that way. Simple as that. Complex as that.

  “Also,” Maddie went on, a bit haltingly now, as if struggling to stall for time, “there has been some doubt expressed as to whether Mr. Wegener did in fact kill the fifty-four women he claimed to have murdered. He could only be positively linked to the death of his girlfriend, Lanis Hassan. He confessed to numerous other killings and provided vivid accounts but claimed a poor memory made it difficult to remember dates, names, or exact locations of the bodies. None of the other alleged fifty-three victims has been located or linked to known missing persons...”

  Had he only wanted attention? To die as a more significant monster? Or had he only been trying to keep himself alive longer by dangling the promise of useful information in other murder cases? He could no longer veil the truth, now. His brain could no longer devise lies, or keep secrets...just as it could no longer kill.

  A tiny beep indicated that all the memories, experiences, thoughts, feelings and deeds soaked into this fleshly sponge had been fully recorded, filling two whole chips. Maddie consulted her notes for a date upon which Wegener claimed to have murdered one of his alleged victims. She hit SEARCH, and an invisible scout went racing through the doppleganger mind of the killer. The date came up, Maddie hit PLAY, and a scene filled the monitor, a day in the life of the deceased Peter Wegener as seen through his eyes.

  Those eyes looked down upon a woman, and Maddie felt an almost nauseous wrench of tension to see that she was naked and he moving atop her. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, mouth gaping; dear God, was she dead? But Maddie saw the woman’s eyes open and look directly into her own. It was a dreamy look of pleasure. Even of love. Maddie touched a few keys to burrow through further depths of knowledge. She was able to read even the subconscious awareness in Wegener’s mind that this was his girlfriend Lanis Hassan, whom he had murdered in a jealous fit of rage only two years later, when she left him to move in with her supervisor from work.

 
Maddie watched the couple’s love-making as if a third party in it, or even half of it (strangely empathizing with both Peter and Lanis), although she wasn’t wearing the headset that would enable her to “remember” the physical aspects of the experience, its smells, tastes, tactile sensations. It almost wasn’t necessary. Her own memory brought back to her how attractive Peter Wegener had been, his own head thrown back and eyes shut in death as if in pleasure.

  Maddie shook herself a bit, as though rousing from a doze. She reached out and banished the scene, partly out of embarrassment, partly out of shame. She fast-forwarded to later in that day, but at this point was inclined to believe Wegener had either been mistaken about the date or had indeed lied about his sins.

  When Maddie stopped advancing to play the recording again, she sat back hard in her chair as if struck in the face. Thank God the audio was not engaged. Just seeing the screams without any sound deafened the mind. It was another woman below Wegener now. It was not love in her face, but fear and pain. And blood. Maddie couldn’t watch it for more than thirty seconds before she clawed at the keyboard to blot the horrors out.

  She got up from her chair, backed away from the work station as if it were Wegener himself, smirking at her, locked inside her apartment with her. She wanted to flee from him, as she had finally fled from her husband. In fear. In pain. But she forced herself to hold her ground.

  How could he have done that? Murdered one woman, mere hours after loving another? How could a man be capable of such contradiction? Affection, then unexpected cruelty? It wasn’t necessary. Wasn’t necessary. She didn’t understand it. All this technology to get inside its every cell, and the man’s brain was still an utter mystery to her. Was the fault in her own mind, that she couldn’t properly read another’s? Would another woman have better understood her ex-husband and his latent demons?

  So, it hadn’t been a lie, about other killings. She was shocked, for some reason. Wegener had claimed a poor memory, but the mind forgets nothing. Everything is saved, preserved. Finding it again is the trick. Maybe he hadn’t killed all the women he claimed, but he had killed more than one, so it was likely there would be others. Let someone else catalog them, however. Exhume those graves. She had done her part.

  She was weirdly disappointed, she found. She had wanted him to be innocent but for the one crime of passion. He hadn’t looked like a monster, to her. Then again, her husband had been a handsome man, as well...

  A soft whirring sound, and a glance at her keyboard told her that in her haste and awkwardness she had hit REVERSE. She approached her desk to stop it. The read-out revealed that she had regressed Wegener to the age of six. It was two days after Christmas. The proximity of the holiday sparked an odd little curiosity in Maddie. How had this murderer spent Christmas in his sixth year? It was as simple a matter to resolve as a touch or two of her keypads.

  Maddie activated AUDIO, settled slowly back into her chair to watch...

  “Mama, wake up,” said a child’s voice. It sounded angry, and tearful. “Mama, wake up! Wake up!” A small hand shook a woman’s shoulder. She was lying on a sofa, her hair covering her face, closed eyes and a gaping mouth showing through it. Had she died? Maddie wondered, rigid with concern. But the woman grumbled irritably and pushed his hand away. Even without the headset to stimulate her own brain, Maddie could imagine the mother’s drunken breath.

  The point of view swivelled to look toward a Christmas tree. Its lights weren’t turned on, and there were no presents underneath it.

  Perhaps they were in a closet somewhere. Maddie didn’t believe that his mother had failed to buy any, simply that she had been too drunk on Christmas eve to set them out. But they weren’t there. And neither, in effect, was his mother.

  “Wake up!” he cried. He sounded closer to sobs, and closer to rage. “Wake up!”

  Maddie hit STOP. Randomly, she advanced. Hit PLAY again. And so this continued, for several hours...though not once again did she return to a crime scene.

  When he was ten years old, Peter’s dog was injured by a hovercar that passed over it in the street. His mother (Maddie never saw a father) took him to the veterinarian, and the dog was put to sleep...although the vet had informed the mother it could be saved. They hadn’t the money, she told him. And so the mother waited out at the desk, leaving Peter and the animal in the stark examination room with its holographic displays of animal anatomy like ghostly carcasses hung up in an abattoir. While the doctor prepped the injection, the small dog—in Peter’s arms—watched out the one window eagerly, as if anticipating a return to the outside and a ride in the car after they were done here. Peter buried his face in the fur of its neck. In earlier scenes Maddie had viewed, he had done the same. A half hour ago, Maddie had watched Peter nuzzle the softer fur of its neck when the dog was still a puppy. He had found it while skipping school. A tiny wandering stray that might have died had he not come along and rescued it, given it a home. And now, the dog he had carried home in his arms passed away in his arms, and Peter bucked with hard sobs.

  His mother didn’t hit him that day, perhaps out of sympathy. But other days she did, and each time she witnessed it, Maddie flinched as if she had been struck herself.

  Back and forth in time she flipped, as through the pages of a scrapbook. In high school Peter got in a fight with another boy over a girl they both liked, and Peter pummeled the boy mercilessly. Beat him bloody. Though she didn’t access emotions to find out, she felt that Peter enjoyed giving the beating. Sought the blood more than he sought the girl. In any case, it was the last memory that Maddie watched. It was a critical scene, she thought, like the crumbling of a bridge. She didn’t want to see more. Not after what she had been watching these past few hours. It was as if she didn’t want to remember this person as a killer.

  Ten minutes away from here, a brain rested at the bottom of a tank. It would be destroyed in a second execution now that it had been wrung dry. Right now it was still alive, in a way. And it lived on two chips in her computer. An after-life, rather, she supposed. But the seance was over. The night was quiet again; so very still in here. Very lonely in here. A huge cold city lay all around her, outside these walls. It was Punktown. People were dying out there even at this moment. While others loved.

  Maddie sat there staring at her series of screens, now all of them blank. The pasted-on vertical eye in her forehead still gazed dispassionately. But tears began to flow from her actual eyes. She felt afraid of the mind she had just stolen inside. She felt hatred for the man who had caused so much suffering and death. And her heart ached for the little boy who had been Peter Maxwell Wegener.

  PRECIOUS METAL

  The next band to play was DeVeined Shrimp, a Choom quartet. One of the members played an oversized saxophone with thirty finger keys and a ridiculously broad mouthpiece suited to his Choom’s ear-to-ear dolphin smile. Their singer wore a slinky black dress, her hair in a glossy black bob, her miles of lips painted a laser red to call further attention to them. Of course, Grey had lived long enough on the world Oasis to take its native Chooms for granted; long enough to find the singer sexy. He watched her through the shifting veil of his cigarette smoke as she cleverly scatted her way through an ancient Choom religious chant, a monotonous dirge that she had turned into a swooping roller coaster ride. They already had his vote.

  The previous band had been Idiot Savant, and they milled about the jazz club chatting it up with friends who had come to offer support and votes in tonight’s “battle of the bands” competition. Grey Harlequin shifted his gaze to a few of them knotted in conversation, narrowing his eyes as if the smoke had just stung them. The members of Idiot Savant were robots. Their instruments were cleverly integrated with their bodies, so that these resembled overly baroque chrome and brass saxophones given a vaguely human shape. Only one, the singer, had anything like a human head, an expressionless blind sculpture of brass with black articulated lips like rubber. Their keyboard player was a walking synthesizer and the leader of the ba
nd, nicknamed Organ. Grey and his friends called him Dildo instead.

  These machines and their ilk were the descendants of a group of robots who had once worked at the nearby Paxton Autoworks, which was all but leveled during the Union War by organic laborers—most of them laid off—rebelling against the use of robots in their place. Most of the automatons had been slaughtered, but a number had lived on after the riots in the ruins of the plant and in other ruins in that war zone of decimated factories. When these were gradually reclaimed and rebuilt (following new battles with a few robot tribes reluctant to give up their squatter’s rights), the robots found their way into those abandoned subway tunnels sealed off and forgotten after the great earthquake. Down there, with machinery they took with them from the factories and new machinery they built themselves, they had given birth to successive generations of new robots, who had never known organic masters.

  They were arrogant, hateful things, Grey thought, gazing at them through his ragged camouflage of smoke. And they were competitors...because even though they had created their own hermetic society within society, they still needed money in order to buy the components and materials for their secret and unlicenced places of manufacture. Their origins being illegal, they could not rent themselves out as legitimate workers...nor would they consent to that anyway, out of pride. So instead, they mass produced a product to earn these needed funds. This product was a device called a buzzer, which could be hidden in an organic being’s pocket, transmitting signals to an adhesive-backed disk affixed to the wearer’s temple (these disks coming in a variety of flesh colors to blend in). The buzzer device would, via this disk, then broadcast pleasure to the brain. There were various settings for intensity, and various species of buzzer—some inspiring wondrous hallucinations, some heightening sexual pleasure, some (often worn by street gangs) triggering an exciting lust for violence. What did these spiteful machines care about the effects they had on organics? In fact, Grey was certain they took great satisfaction in adding to the corruption of the living beings they so despised.