LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  ‘ … Huh. Ask Safety-Catch here how he got his handle.’

  ‘Fuck off, Rack, just fuck off.’

  ‘So, sweetie, how’d you get it?’

  ‘No way, no way.’

  ‘Go on Safety. Safe-ty, Safe-ty, Safe-ty…’

  Then again…

  I tune out. God knows where you have to go for a decent conversation these days, but this sure isn’t it. I take a long deep drag of nicotine and tar. Fuck people. Drugs are where it’s at. Which is bollocks, but there you go. I think I’ll slap on a derm of Gyralene, swallow a couple of Bangs and take a good long line of Wahoo! and then I won’t have to remember how dismal this place suddenly seems now that I don’t belong any more. Yeah, I’ll dance like an electric monkey, maybe catch me one of these Ronin flowers, maybe not, maybe get cut up by someone else whacked out on Bang, maybe wake up in some place I’ve never seen before and spend the next day body-doubling for some rag doll, drooling‘cool evening, dude! Was I like, epically loaded or what?’

  Look at things like that and suddenly nothing’s much fun anymore. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I can’t hide from myself. I wish I knew which. Maybe I should go home and talk to Ortov and see what god has to say, except I have a sneaking suspicion that God’s view would be go party, do drugs, get laid, go to hell, I don’t give a fuck, you’re way beyond my help.

  ‘Hey there, gothdude.’

  Someone is waving at me. I’ve never seen her before but one glance corrects that quite comprehensively. Hmmm… Chicken wire. Interesting attire.

  ‘Spare a light, gothdude?’

  I pass her my lighter. This lighter, understand, is a twenty-first century chrome-plated storm lighter. It has its usual effect.

  ‘Hey, cool! I want one. Where’d you get this?’

  ‘I secrete them from my armpits.’

  She gives me the look. The Oh-wow-I’m-wasted look. I can’t help but smile. Something about the leather boots, the leather gloves, or maybe it’s the chicken wire. Maybe it’s what’s under the chicken wire, which isn’t much apart from a whole lot of skin. Yeah, probably that.

  Fuck it. Bang and Wahoo! can have another chance at making life OK. I ask her name. She says Arcadia. I take Arcadia by the hand and lead her to the pulsing writhing thrashfloor…

  The morning after. Ragdoll time. The inevitable consequence. Something hurts. Sharp and burning. With all the shit I dropped last night I’m supposed to be comfortably numb, not feeling like I’ve accidentally gone to sleep in a coil of razor wire. And I haven’t. It’s not even a rubbish skip. This is a bed. Of sorts. I wonder whose.

  I peer around the room. Smells of sweat and sex and old laundry and something else. Spicy. The ceiling and the walls are black, merging into a blood red floor, crimson paint splattered across the lower walls. More than a dozen mirrors hang from the ceiling, random sizes, shapes, heights, angles, all pointing in towards the focus of the room, the great iron bed in its middle, and in the middle of that, me. Feels like the boudoir for some duke of hell. Or duchess.

  Chicken wire is scattered all over the place, great chunks and bitsy strands. Guess I’d better be careful where I tread. I lie back and stretch out. If I try, I can spread-eagle myself and not touch a single side of the bed. My hand slides under the pillows. There’s something there, something hard…

  I snap awake. A gun! But it’s not; it’s a flat photograph in a frame. A Ronin posing with his sword. Happy and smiling and, well, rather normal. Seems out of place in this room. I’m still looking at it when Arcadia comes back in. Swathed in bright blue silk, embroidered with iridescent snakes. Her hair is long and dark and tangled. Beautiful. Not sure which I want more, her or her wrap.

  She sees me holding the photograph and stops, just for an instant.

  ‘Who is he?’ I ask.

  ‘Arclight,’ she says, and goes kind of stiff. Maybe she thinks I’m jealous, but I’ve been in this scene far too long for that.

  ‘Steady lover?’ I ask.

  She nods and seems to sag a little. I smile at her. It comes easily. Tell me. Let it out… ‘He’s a handsome bastard.’

  ‘He was.’ She nods again, turns her back to me, sits on the edge of the bed and lights a spliff– guess now I know where that spicy smell came from. She’s tense. I need to tread carefully. I could leave and maybe I should. But for some reason I want to know more. I want to understand, even though it’ll mean nothing to me– she’ll mean nothing to me– an hour from now. In this moment I want her to share him with me. The thing with being a negotiator is you always got to dig; I can’t turn it off.

  And something else. She’s human. Real. There’s nothing faked about this, nothing hidden, no politics, no agenda, just… feelings. Honest ones. I need a fix of that.

  She turns, sprawls across the bed and clings to me. A shudder. Tears. I hold her tight like she wants me to.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He told me about you,’ she says.‘Constantine. Used to hang around with the Gothics. Dodgy bastard. Went off to be a salaryman for the secret service, or so they say. Is that true?’

  ‘Used to be.’ A little voice inside me screams why the fuck did you tell her that? Just fuck her again and get out and do your fucking job, for Christ’s sake!

  ‘Said you could fix anything. Drugs, hardware, all sorts.’

  ‘Used to. Guess Mr Pleasant and Doktor Avalanche took over after I left.’

  ‘I want you to fix something for me.’

  Just say no!‘What?’

  ‘I want you to fix the people who killed Arclight.’

  For a moment I’m stunned. If there’s one thing I never did, it was hits. Way too heavy for a coward like me.

  ‘They carved him up. When he tried to run they gunned him down. Mr Strange was there. He saw it all.’

  ‘Who did it?’ Aargh! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Stop now before you say yes…

  ‘Shogun says it was the surfers.’

  ‘What does Mr Strange say?’

  ‘Killers. Corporate killers. Maybe secret service. People like you.’

  I feel a strange numbness creeping through me. Maybe it’s what’s left of the drugs. And maybe it isn’t. People like me. The Company. People who do things like kidnap gene warfare experts perhaps?

  She kisses me. Her mouth tastes of mint and smoke and marijuana. One hand reaches under the sheets, fingernails running down my back, skipping over the red lines of the night before. The other takes my own, slides it inside her silk, presses it against her breast, soft, the nipple pushing into my palm.

  I’m being set up. Again.‘Who…?’

  ‘Fuck me.’

  Sometime later, she rolls over and lights another spliff.

  ‘Mr Strange wants to talk to you. At the ruin. Sunset.’

  Standish, P. T., Pike, J. H. et al. ‘Chromatin Switching using a Viral Agent’. Journal of Genetics, 193, 256-278 (2316).

  These guys developed a technique for turning genes on and off using genetically engineered viruses. Apparently this technique could be an aid to stopping the deformities which sometimes stop clones from developing to maturity properly. Everyone seems interested, but no one’s made it work the way they want yet. Not so far as they’re telling, anyway. Interestingly,‘Pike, J. H.’ went on to bigger and better things and you’re trying to un-kidnap him right now. And guess who owns the McKinley Institute? Score ten points and advance to the next level if you said the Longthorne family.

  Twenty-Three – Strange Days

  Outside a few worlds in the First Republic Dust Sector, Cestus was the first to feel the press of human feet. The original pioneers landed some three hundred years ago, still using EPR drives to get around, and the first thing they built was the ruin. Wasn’t always a ruin; some bits of it are still used– the neutrino bath five miles under my feet, for example. But there was an accident, toxic chemical release, radioactive waste, something like that. The optical telescope got moved– it’s in a museum now, the largest reflecting telescope ever built. F
or a credit towards its upkeep your children can look through and stare at a pattern of craters on the moon that spell out someone’s name, or at the golden halo around the North pole of Ninya, all kinds of crap like that.

  The radio telescope they left. Too big, too toxic, and anyway it was the twenty-second century by then and no one in their right mind did any kind of astronomy on the ground any more. Parts corroded, bits fell off, but basically it stayed. A three hundred foot parabola wrapped in rusting steel. The kind of place where children come to play because they know they shouldn’t, where gangs kick the shit out of other gangs because they know they won’t be disturbed.

  It takes me a while to find my way to Mr Strange. I remember this place well, but that was years ago. The metal and the weeds, the scent of dope and shine, the cacophony of music from a hundred personal speakers, all the same. But the people? A little cluster of Ronin nervous and ready, hiding in a corner. The rest are new to me. I guess the ones decked out in silver are the Silver Surfers. From a distance they look like they’re wearing space suits, and with the shadow of the telescope looming over them… they could call themselves the Space Cadets.

  There are a lot of them though, so I probably should keep that to myself. There are other gangs too, but mostly it’s the Surfers tonight.

  Mr Strange is waiting for me on top of the telescope where we always met before. We sit on the edge of the dish, our feet dangling over nothing, the air quiet, the wind stealing all but a few snatches of the hubbub below. It’s getting dark, the horizon in front of us flaming pink. Throughout the rest of the city the lights are coming on. The first stars, the strongest, are beginning to pierce the sky.

  ‘A long time,’ I say as I join him.

  ‘Long for some. Short for others. We are all made up of tiny things that no one can understand, each one smeared out across the whole of space and the whole of time. Why is today today? Why can’t tomorrow be yesterday? Why can’t we fly?’

  He has a rifle resting across his lap. Expensive. Sniping sights. He picks it up.

  ‘Why is it?’ he asks as he takes aim.‘Why is it that the tiny things come together to make bigger things? Why do they make this bullet? Why do they make that Surfer? Why do they…’ The gun jerks as he fires. I hardly hear it, nothing more than a whisper of the air tearing apart.‘Why do they make this bullet bite into that Surfer and rip his heart to shreds? What makes them stay together?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Strange, what the fuck are you doing?’ I’d quite like to scream in his face. And then maybe push him off the ironwork because it’s a little too much like Jester and the people in Shithole, just a little close to the bone, and also, really, do I have to be an accessory to yet another murder? But that’s not how this plays. It’s already obvious this is his swan song.

  He picks another target, fires again and then turns to look at me.‘Don’t you ever wonder? Or do you know? Is that why you left us, because there were no more questions?’

  The Surfers below are starting to notice that two of them are dead. The ones nearby run for cover, little silver ants so far away. Elsewhere they still don’t know, the cry hasn’t reached them yet. Mr Strange shoots a few more to speed things up. I really badly want to ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing and could he please do it some time when I’m not around. But that would show poor etiquette. I must wait until he tells me, else he won’t tell me at all. I’m pretty sure he sent Arcadia to me. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t expect to see another dawn. So I guess whatever he needs me to know, it has to matter to him, but if I fuck with his mojo then he won’t tell me. Pride that is, although Strange calls it honour.

  Bollocks to honour.

  ‘They’ll spot us, sooner or later,’ I say. Better fucking be worth it, that’s all.

  Mr Strange gives me a surprised look.‘So direct? Then we will have to leave. I hope you’re not afraid of heights.’

  Surfers are running around like angry space-spiders. Pop– there goes another. I feel a sense of detachment, the same feeling I had watching Jester pretending to shoot people in Shithole, only here it’s really happening. A repulsion too– these Surfers may be bastards or they may not, but they’re still human. They don’t deserve this.

  I hold the feeling at bay, harder this time to do it, but it still comes without effort. Held at bay by who I am and what I do. Held at bay by Charlemagne.

  ‘I wanted you to see.’ Strange shifts to a more comfortable firing position.‘I wanted you to see what they’ve started.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people you’re looking for.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The Surfers have spotted us now. The metal begins to pop and hiss– takes me a while to understand this is the sound of bullets punching into it, bouncing away. Inaccurate bullets, but I lie down all the same.

  ‘Arclight was my friend. He was with Mace. They were here. I came to meet them but I was too late. I saw two other people. Very nasty. Too nasty for me. Too nasty for you. Professionals. The Shogun says they were Surfers, and in the eyes of my brothers, I am dishonoured for that, for not striking them down the moment I saw them. In the eyes of my brothers I regain that honour tonight, but in the eyes of my spirit I gain nothing. They weren’t Surfers. I was there and I saw them and I know. They carried Teslas and spoke softly. They wore dark night clothes. Surfers do none of these things. These were of the corporate ninja clans.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘A week, ten days maybe. Mace is in a coma now. They say he won’t come out in a hurry.’

  I peer over the edge into the void. Difficult to see. It’s almost dark now, but the silver of the Surfers shows up nicely against the black earth. They’re climbing the dish.

  ‘We need to go,’ I say.‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Both tall. Man and a woman. The woman was dark, dark skin, dark hair. Big lips. Implants maybe. The man was blonde. Had heavy jitsu with a knife. Arclight could knife-fight pretty well, but he was far out of his league that night. Mace got bullet in the head from the woman. Fast, but not frighteningly so.’ He puts the rifle down and crawls to the back of the dish.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No. Here, hold this.’ He passes me an armful of rope.

  Bungee rope.

  ‘Don’t worry, I brought two,’ he says.‘You want to talk to Mr Pleasant. Gothics and the Ronin don’t get on too well at the moment on account of Shadowfax trying to move us along, but we still trade a few names. Mr Pleasant knows these people. Strictly business. Mr Pleasant knows a great deal. Perhaps these are the people you already hunt?’ He gives me a bungee harness. I look at it. I really don’t want to do this.

  ‘Surfers going to be waiting for us down there, you know.’

  Mr Strange stops. He turns to face me like I just dealt him a mortal insult.‘I am, of course, entirely prepared. Are you?’ He snorts, throws the harness at me and jumps.

  Traznor, N. I. & deVriees, H. H. G. ‘The long-term effects of sensory deprivation’. AI News, 48, 122-129 (2310).

  Kinda personally interesting this. A study into the difference between what happens to people and what happens to AIs if you switch off all their input for a while. Seems like people gradually lose their attachment to reality– fuck knows how they got people to volunteer for these experiments– and then gradually get it back again. AIs seem to either be unaffected or else crash (they call it insanity but when software fucks up I call it a crash). Once an AI goes over the edge, nothing seems to bring them back. Traznor and deVriees figure this shows a fundamental difference between a digital system and an analogue system. What I want to know is: which am I?

  Twenty-Four – Parthenogenesis

  I spend the rest of the night wandering around Bethlehem. It’s not a good time to be out. The Surfers are a tad pissed off. They outnumber the Ronin four to one but the Ronin have been getting ready for days. It’s war andit’s bloody. The last time I saw this was when the Rappers decided to kick the Gothics out. Long t
ime ago but I remember it like it was yesterday. They chopped the Sandman down. Devotion and Satori. Violator had it coming. Half the rest of them in hospital by the end of the night but the Rappers still lost. I liked the Sandman. He had a depth to him and he was taking the rest with him. Kinda like Strange. When I got word the Rappers had taken him out and were looking for the rest of us, I should have gone to ground. I shouldn’t have picked up the Company Tesla and gone outside. I don’t know what came over me. The Rappers had knives, chains, fists. A few guns, but they didn’t use them. That wasn’t the way things were done. I showed them otherwise. Found six of them, Phantom and Devotion backed into a corner. Devotion was a sweet thing, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Phantom could look after herself but not against six.

  I’m there again. The Rappers have them. A knife flashes in the darkness. None of them even know I’m there. Two of them grab Devotion, hold her. I hear her pleading. The knife flashes again. They’ve cut her face. Phantom goes berserk, lashes out, almost breaks free. I’ve never even hit anyone before, yet without even thinking much about it, I’ve pulled out the Tesla and I’m firing it into them, into all of them. Charlemagne has come to life. This is what the Company has made of me. Phantom walks away without a scratch; gives me a look of sheer terror, flees into the night and that’s the last I ever see of her. The rest of them are dead. Turns out they’d just cut Devotion to spoil her looks, didn’t kill her at all. I’ve done that all myself. I blame the Rappers. Their fault.

  I’d killed another ten by the end of the night. They never bothered us again. Sometimes you just lose yourself, y’know? Just suddenly not the person you thought you were.

  Charlemagne changed the game forever. Tonight it’s that all-new war. The Surfers have guns, the Ronin have bombs and rockets. I swear I see a kid, can’t be more than thirteen, running down the street with a landmine under his arm. Normally the government couldn’t give a shit what two packs of street trash do to each other but they’re in for a shock tonight. Won’t be long before the world is full of armoured police. I walk quickly, keeping to the shadows. Mr Pleasant sells me some Gyralene, a couple of hits of Bash, tells me there are some new people in town, been buying drugs and hardware, lots of medical stuff, and yeah, it was a tall blond man who bought the drugs. Says go see Smelly Eddie and Doktor Avalanche. Both been branching out into biotech of late. I give him some of the Company’s money and tell him to disappear for the night. Smelly Eddie I tell the same. I give some more money when he tells me yeah, this blond guy lived somewhere on Vollstandige Road over a software house.