by Stephen Deas
‘Change of plan,’ whispers Jester.‘I’ll meet you round the front.’ He pulls a tiny gun and walks towards the Jeep. I frown. This is bullshit. If the policeman’s here because of the bodies in our room, why the fuck weren’t there more of them waiting by the door? If he isn’t, what’s he want with our jeep? Maybe Jester’s really has been standing on the balcony shooting at the poor people in the shanty town and they’d like him to stop, if it’s not too much trouble?
‘Not liking this,’ I hiss to Jester across our link. Jester doesn’t answer. Mr Cray slips away, back into the hotel and up to the street. Me, I stay in the shadows to watch. Too much of a coincidence, this. Doesn’t feel right.
Jester approaches the policeman. The policeman starts to say something, and then stops and sinks to the ground instead, clutching his stomach. Jester picks him up and throws him into the back of the Jeep…
I’m lying on the floor. Something bad has happened. My ears are ringing again and lights are dancing merry mazurkas before my eyes. I’m stunned and I’m not sure by what. There was a policeman, I remember, but there’s no one standing over me carrying a shock baton…
I pick myself up, shake my head clear, and everything makes some deeply shitty sense. The car park is a mess of torn metal and burning plastic, and the centre of the mess is the remains of our jeep, except that most of the remains are plastered over the ceiling ten feet up. Somehow one of the policeman’s boots has been thrown clear and is standing upright, smoking gently, a few feet away from me. There’s a sizeable crater in the concrete floor barely a yard from where I’d last seen Jester standing. There’s no sign of Jester himself and I’m not waiting around to see if he miraculously survived, because there’s no possible way.
My filters are still fucked. Clearly I need an upgrade for my new lifestyle of people trying to blow me up. I run away and catch up with Mr Cray and grab his arm and sprint down the street with him. Outside it’s dark and it’s raining.
‘What the fuck…?’
‘Someone just turned Jester into foie gras.’ This shuts him up for a whole moment. We’d both assumed until now that Jester was pretty much indestructible.
‘What?’
‘They blew the jeep. With Jester in it. Took out half the car park.’
Mr Cray looks at me as though I’ve been indulging in a variety of illegal but nevertheless highly available narcotics. At last the penny drops. The Bratstva are here, and they’re righteously pissed. Praise the fucking lord.
‘GZW.’ I figure that’s our only choice.‘We go for protection.’
Cray shakes his head. And yeah, we might have stood there in the street with gun-toting crazy-arsed barcodes hunting us and Jester smeared across a car park less than a minute ago but then there’s this weird wailing noise. Mr Cray, whose ears are less fucked than mine, twigs to it first and looks up. I follow in time to see a body smash into the street just a dozen feet away.
‘Jesus fucked a donkey!’ Cray jerks away from the body. I’m still looking up so I’m not so surprised when the second one hits a few moments later. Then another two. A pause. One more. The last one is Mr GZW. I squint up but it’s too dark to see to the top of the hotel. They’ve come down a long way, that’s as much as I can tell.
‘Alright, never mind that plan then.’
So we run. I make a beeline for the Shithole. Out here in the corporate enclave we stick out like bright screaming lights in a dark field. In the Shithole we can hide. Other times I might worry about a place like that, especially if Jester really has been picking off poor bastards from the hotel balcony, but right now I couldn’t care less. The Bratstva will stand out as badly as we do, that’s what matters. However hard they try, at least I get to see them coming. Or that’s what I’m thinking when we get out of the corporate enclave. That and a fuckton of relief that we got this far at all.
First pair of drunks I find passing a dark alley get themselves tasered. Now Mr Cray and I have new clothes. We fit in. I leave the drunks our old ones. We get to the bus station– yeah, the Shithole has one, it’s that backward. In the shanty-town, and only for the locals, of course. There’s the thing about the Rim and the Fading Suns and the Dust Sector too these days. Pushing five hundred years since Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir made his first internal combustion engine and it’s still here because no one came up with anything better. It’s fuel. Energy. Everything comes back to the same because that fusion dream of infinite supply? Never happened. No one can make it work. Solar arrays? Fine if you’re on the grid. If there’s a grid. Ultra-high energy-density batteries? Sure, if you don’t mind that they’re basically highly toxic, if you can pay for them, maintain them and service your appliances so they don’t degrade and explode. Oh, yeah, and don’t let it trouble you that any fool can turn a battery into a bomb in about thirty seconds. Cell the size of my finger can take out a house in the right hands.
Jeeps and buses. Fuelled by alcohol, same as the people. We can count ourselves lucky it’s not donkeys.
By now we’re queuing for tickets to fuck-knows-where and I’m not so sure this was smart after all. Obviously we have a fistful of fake identities. Obviously the Bratstva are going to know that. Obviously we’re not going to go to the bus station even though that’s where we actually are because that’s far too obvious. If we were just paranoid then we’d steal something and drive off with it, but this is far beyond paranoia now. Maybe no one here’s got a barcode on their back, but anyone figures out who we really are, figures we’re guys with two dead Bratstva slowly rotting on our hotel floor, figures maybe there’s a few Stars dollars in it for them, they’re going to shoot us. No questions, no excuse me’s, and definitely no doubt about it. And I keep seeing Mr GZW’s mangled face, his unblinking eyes sideways from the tarmac. What the hell did Melissa do? And how they fuck did the Brotherhood get here so quick? And most of all, how the fuck did we get caught in the middle of it? I’d need a terminal with a map of space to figure it for sure but I’m betting there’s not more than a half a dozen systems they could have come from, most of them Rim territory, and even then they’d have to have been sitting in a ship with their finger poised ready to spin a warp at a moment’s notice…
No. Maybe the Brotherhood have a thing for all that Desperate Dave shit, but my gut says they were already here, already hunting before Melissa did she her thing. But why, for fuck’s sake? And what, in the name of Lucifer’s arsehole, did she just do?
‘I figure they want me alive,’ pipes Mr Cray.‘I figure they whacked Jester because he knows fuck all about the shit that matters. It’s me they want to talk to. They want to know what happened for those five hours.’
‘They’re going to be pissed when you can’t tell them.’
‘Yeah? Maybe if I just tell them the truth then they’ll be grateful enough to let me go, eh? Maybe we should go talk to them and tell them what happened.’
Some people spend their lives striving for stupidity. For others, it’s a birth right.‘You do that, Cray. I’ll watch. But go for it. The Bratstva are really forging ahead as a sharing caring set of dudes, I hear. I’m sure we’d all like to know, but you’ll excuse me if I just keep running while you’re handing yourself in.’
‘It worked with GZW,’ he says petulantly.
‘You call this“worked”? Funny, because I was thinking of calling it a clusterfuck and a fine example of why I don’t want to ever try that again. But you go ahead. Me, I feel a trip to the Dust Sector coming on.’
‘That’s wilderness, man! There’s places there you can’t even get access!’ Mr Cray would like to think that he and the hypernet are symbionts, feeding and nurturing one another. Me, I think it’s more like a parasite host relationship, but who am I to criticise? Besides, I’ve kinda lost track of which one’s the parasite and which one’s the host these days. He’s got a point though. Life without an uplink can be pretty fucking awkward even for a know-nothing. I’m going to need money. Which means cashing in on the Network SixtyNine job. Which me
ans going back to Cestus before I vanish. Which means Jez.
Shit.
We get to the head of the ticket queue. I feel like I have a sign hanging over me saying Badass Old World Dude in flashing pink neon, complete with a dinky and unnecessary arrow that stops an inch from my neck. I miss Jester and the stuff he had in his head. The sight of a gun fires a dozen different neuro-stimulators into his system, so he claims. On a bad day he really does kill without thinking.
Wrong tense. Fired. Claimed. Did. All that code in his head, the metal and plastic body implants, the short-circuits through his brain. Fuck all good it did him in the end. Can’t dodge a bomb.
I’ve reached the front of the queue. An angry Rimmer stands behind the counter. He wants to know if I want a ticket or just to waste everyone’s time. I shake myself back into the present. Jester’s nothing but novelty ceiling décor now. The past. Gone.
‘Yeah, two,’ I tell the Rimmer. He gesticulates wildly and pretends to tear his hair out as he explains that he had asked where to, not did I want two.‘Wherever,’ I say, but this isn’t the right answer. Bus don’t go to anywhere. Bus go to here, here and here. Ticket don’t go anywhere either. I decide I’d like to see a map…
—the thought starts as a muddle of neurons and cellular chemistry. The brainweb picks it up, filters out the crap about being hungry and scared shitless and I wonder what the weather’s like back on Cestus right now and all that shit, and squirts a microwave packet into the hypernet. Mr Cray would pour scorn on the sluggish microsecond response times of a backwater like Szenchzuen, but hey, microsecond, nanosecond, who really gives a shit? The hypernet squirts back—
… and one appears before my eyes, projected up onto sunglasses I really should have ditched with the rest of my clothes. But, what can I say, they’re a real rare designer set and I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Call me old fashioned that way. Most Old Worlders get state of the art artificial bio-electrical implant eyes these days, soon as they turn eighteen, but mine are my own. Twenty-twenty and no reason to change them. So I use a projector. Now, where to go? Back into Stars turf seems a logical choice. Running into the teeth of danger. Unexpected to the point of insanity. Old Worlders like Mr Cray and I can pass as natives there better than we can here as Rimmers. And it’ll be easy to get out of the gravity well and hop onto a ship to the Stars proper, and from there to anywhere. Best, least regulated transport network in the galaxy at my beck and call…
I stop myself. Too many good reasons. Reasons aren’t clever here. I pick a place at random instead.
Mr Cray barges past me.‘Have you seen this fuck?’ he demands. He has a holograph of Melissa, which is more than I do. I watch the expression on the ticket seller’s face, fearing he’s is about to follow Jester’s example, but Mr Cray slaps down a pile of Stars dollars.
‘K’Tial,’ he says at last, vanishing the money before our eyes.
‘Two for K’Tial then,’ says Mr Cray. More dollars follow and now the ticket seller is beaming at us and expressing his deepest wishes for a pleasant journey. I ignore him. K’Tial. Full of ruins. Very famous. Very dull. Very pointless. I can’t fault the choice– no one will think to look for us there… oh, wait, unless they’re looking for Melissa too…
Fuckwit.
‘You’re not going to find her,’ I say as we leave the station. I’m still a little surprised. Easy to forget that Mr Cray’s not the useless hanger-on Jester paints him to be. Easy to forget he’s probably way smarter than I am, for all his personality defects. But I can’t find much respect for someone who spends more time in a world that doesn’t even exist. Not after what the Company taught me.
‘Oh yeah? You watch.’
We wander dark streets, alleys, cracked prefab walls all around, patches of yellow straining through scratched anti-glare plastic windows, dim and harsh all at the same time. We have hours to kill and not be killed before we can bid farewell to this sorry excuse for a civilisation, before we can step back through time to another, more primitive, more noble…
That’s the fucking brochure talking. I stop myself. It’s a stupid idea going after Melissa, but there’s enough of me, the parts that have a notoriously short term view of things, that would like to find her too.
‘Hey gorgeous! You got the money then I got the time.’ Mr Cray is ahead of me, leering down a darkened alleyway at a silky svelte silhouette.
‘Well, fuck me. What a good idea.’
He has a point. It would be a way to say goodbye to Shithole. It would pass the time and maybe keep us out of sight, hidden in some dark sweaty cell. I’m willing to bet the whore has a sister or two if I ask, maybe ten if I have the dollars. But then again maybe I’m not in the mood. So I stand at the top of the alley, watching Mr Cray recede into darkness, hesitating. The silhouette is temptingly alluring. Maybe I’m only jumpy. Maybe it’s not such a bad…
The blast hurls me across the street. One of the dustbins, now a splatter of cheap bubbling plastic. My chest is smoking where shrapnel has stuck into my armoured vest and is slowly setting my shirt alight. I lie on my back and watch, too shocked to move. This is it. Now someone’s going to come out of the alley, out of the smoke, and they’ll be carrying a gun, and all I can think are stupid things– the randomness of it. The indignity of being blown up three times in the same day. Brainweb still working but where are my glasses? I really should trade my filters for a set that’s bombproof…
I’m still waiting when I realise the burning shrapnel has begun to set fire to me as well as my clothes. I forget about being shot and worry about immolation instead. The shrapnel is too hot to touch, too firmly embedded to shake away, so I strip in the street. My fear ebbs. It would be too embarrassing somehow to be executed half naked with my shirt pulled over my face…
I leave my armoured vest smouldering in the road and return to the bus station where I sit on the toilet until it’s time to leave. I can just about believe that even that’s been wired to blow by now, but hey, if I’m going to shit myself, it’s as good a place as any.
Stanton, A. and Drifter, T. ‘Memory Implantation During Growth Phase’. US Journal of Biological Advance, 727, 334-338 (2320).
Not many people have been looking at this since the Stars flattened the First Republic on the pretext that they were engineering super-soldiers, so you can imagine what a stir this raised coming from the Stars itself– the intro article makes it sound like Stanton was a breath away from growing fully trained, brainwashed human slave-clones, that we’d be soon be seeing in-vitro sex-slaves, security drones and super-soldiers in mass production. However, if you read the paper, you’ll still sleep safe at night. Stanton was trying to copy the memories of trained animals by direct brainweb to brainweb transfer but the project was a financial disaster and got pulled before he made much progress. More interesting for the technology he developed– a brainweb seed capable of growing with its host right from the foetus stage. Rumour has it Stanton was bought out by some corporation to work on this with a view to seeding webs into human babies before they’re born.
Five – Beginnings
I sit on the bus, listening to the ancient electric motor struggle and whine at the wrong end of the night, when the battery is low and the sun hasn’t yet risen to give its solemn nod to the god of solar power. The seats are uncomfortable, a stiff contrast to the soulless luxury of Angel Point and our Shithole hotel, but I hardly notice. Outside there’s a glow over the rainforest. Perhaps the sunrise today will be a beautiful one– if you believe the tourist brochures then they always are– but I have other things to worry about. Sitting on a bus for two hours has cleared my mind of everything except a single question.
Why?
It nags, shouts, demanding an answer the way a new-born bird demands food, blind and persistent.
More hours pass. Jester and Mr Cray are gone, but not me. Why? Perhaps the Brothers are hoping I’ll lead them to Melissa. I tell myself they have no way to know of her, but the thought doesn’t convinc
e. They’re the all-seeing Bratstva. Maybe they had the whole place bugged from the start. Maybe they’ve scooped up Jester’s leftovers and reconstructed his brain in a tank, but somehow they’ll know. My eyes begin to close. It’s been a long night and I’m about to pay for the drugs and the stims and the fear. K’Tial is far away. I dream, or remember, or maybe it’s a piece of both.
‘Tyler. Jack Tyler.’ I open my eyes to find a woman standing over me, pointing a gun at my face. She has dark Latin skin and high cheekbones. Her red hair is tied back. It makes her look severe but the eyes give her away, dark and soft and a millimetre too wide. Somewhere in her past, someone’s been pissing with her genes.
Two men in black stand behind her. For a moment I panic; then I realise this isn’t the bus and this isn’t Szenchzuen. I’m in my apartment, or at least, in the memory of an apartment that once was mine, or else a dreaming of it. I open my eyes wide. Dream or not, remembered fear washes over me.
‘Oh shit!’
‘You’ve been a bad boy,’ says the woman. Her name is Jezebel. I know that. We used to work for the same people. So much for building security. I used to want to fuck her too. It says something that I’m thinking that while she points a gun in my face. The far-off dreaming me in the bus from Shithole thinks maybe it says something I’d rather not hear.
I shrink into the far corner of the bed, pulling the sheet around me as if it might somehow stop bullets. Then I relax. This is foolish. I catch her eye again. Still too wide. Hesitant. She wants a reason to spare me. And I want to tell her that it doesn’t work, that her hair and her skin don’t quite sit right together, that the red needs to be darker, a deep copper not this lurid scarlet, but maybe this isn’t the time…
