by Dave Stone
The production of handguns had basically become a question of software rather than hardware design - and software designers tend to get a bit overenthusiastic when designing guns.
The fact that things weren't even worse was due to the relatively crude state of molecular-fabrication technology. It operated on a GIGO principle - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
It was quite possible, for example, to have your ReFAB cook up a tasty steak dinner, provided you were able to add the right chemical mix into the hopper - precisely the same constituents as a tasty steak dinner contains in the first place.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was simpler to just cook the steak yourself - or of course, this being the Meg, to go without and subsist on extruded synthi-karob and triple-recycled fungus matter.
If you wanted to make something metallic and/or polyceramic like a blaster gun, basically, you had to put metal or polyceramics in.
The item that came to be known as the Screaming Meatgun had been happened upon after a battle between two rival gangs of gun-runners, the Sons of the Black Fandango and the Cool Right Hands.
The losers, the Black Fandangos, were subsequently dismembered and fed into the hoppers of their own molecular fabricators - one of which happened to be set for a gun-design based on a process which super-cooled the air around it to produce slugs, and thus an effectively endless supply of ammunition.
The idea had been to simply render the bodies unrecognisable and disrupt their DNA signatures, preventing forensic identification. What happened when the ReFAB processes interacted with human matter, however, was very odd indeed, especially when the Cool Hands came to dispose of the complex and organised synaptic matter inside the severed heads.
And especially, after some experimentation, when they learned that two heads were better than one.
The habitat known as Cantilever City was one of those semi-permanent and semi-official sub-structures, which had agglomerated on and strung itself between the hab-blocks of the Mega-City itself: kilometre-high shanty-towns eking out the last scrap of space in a city hemmed on one side by the Cursed Earth wastelands and by the Black Atlantic on the other.
The unique feature of Cantilever City, the feature that gave it its name, lay in the nature of the Blocks between which it was strung: the Carlos Ezquerra and the Brian Bolland, each a fine and distinct example of the architectural fashion of the times in which they were built.
Ezquerra Block was all extruded, flowing, fractal and somewhat organic-looking faux-geodesic forms. The Bolland Block took minimalism to the extreme: a clean, spare, oblongatic monolith, seven hundred storeys high.
Structures over a certain size, of course, must be dynamic rather than rigid, built to shift and sway under the cumulative effect of even the slightest breeze. The kinetic energy thus produced can then be stored, to supplement in some small way the power taken from other sources.
By some freak of positioning and form, the relationship of movements between Ezquerra and Bolland fell into a recursive and cumulative dynamic pattern. The base kinetic potential was immense, and to waste that kind of power in a resource-hungry City like the Meg would have been a positive crime.
Over the years, piece by piece, a complicated mass of cantilevers, gimbals and gears had congealed between the towers, hooked to dynamos and banks of storage cells, which churned and sparked respectively.
The portholes of the modular pods that served the inhabitants of Cantilever City as living quarters blazed with light, glutted with power even in full daylight. The trading platform, where power-pack recharges were sold to other, less fortunate Mega-City citizens, crawled with genuine, antique and hideously wasteful neon signs.
Those lights were nothing, however, to the screaming traceries of luminescence that currently tracked the panicked human figures on the platform, impacted and tore them apart...
"Drokk!" Dredd slewed his Lawmaster across an Ezquerra access ramp and hauled up on the friction-mat of a Justice Department jump plate. "It's a living slaughter up there, Control! Heavy-duty - looks like the creep has himself a double-header!"
He scanned the complicated mass of the Cantilever City habitat, looking for the source of fire. The impact-visor of his helmet had a track-and-zoom facility, but he didn't use it. It conflicted with his cybernetic eyes, replacements for the eyes he had lost some years before in the line of duty, and the conflict would have left him temporarily blind.
Fortunately, the cyber-eyes had just that track-and-zoom ability themselves. Dredd zeroed in on a thin and ragged-looking man lashed with what appeared to be a length of electrical flex to the support for a pawl-and-ratchet arrangement, several hundred inaccessible metres over the Cantilever City trading platform.
What it was that was actually securing the perp, though, was the very least of Dredd's concerns. The Screaming Meatgun the man held was indeed a double-header - doubling the firepower it could produce.
Assault rifle-like in general form, the gun seemed to have been built from human flesh and bone, frozen in the process of decomposing. The barrel was a spinal column, bulking out where the muzzle should have been in a lumpy, conjoined mass that might have once been a pair of human heads, their features atrophied save for two mouths each lolling open in a permanent scream.
From these mouths, as the man fired, burst gobbets of a plasma-like substance that, even under velocity, seemed to twist in on themselves, writhing and mutating.
Just as the original gun design had been intended to draw its ammunition from the air around it, the Screaming Meatgun drew energy from its surroundings and converted it into these plasma slugs. There was some debate as to the nature of he slugs themselves - they appeared to demonstrate qualities similar to those of living organisms, if extremely short lived.
In any case, quasi-living or not, their purpose in quasi-life was simple: they homed in on living human matter and quite comprehensively shredded it.
"ID-recognition pegs our perp as one Leon Gregor Sturlek," the voice of Control was saying in the helpful tones of one sitting well away from a situation and who doesn't have to actually deal with it.
"Unemployed. Fits the quiet-and-inoffensive-loner profile, but not so much that it threw up active flags. Med-records show some slight degree of latent psionic talent, nowhere near enough to put a blip on the Psi-Division sonar."
"Drokk that, Control," Dredd snapped. "I couldn't give a flying drokk. He's holed up out of reach. I need tactical response as of now."
"A Manta's on its way," said the voice of Control. "ETA four minutes, plus or minus."
Up above, the Screaming Meatgun was still firing. It wasn't going to stop, and when the last Cantilever City inhabitant died, the slugs would just start targeting the citizens slightly farther away in the supporting hab-blocks.
"Four minutes is too long," Dredd said, staring up at the Cantilever City structure and judging the angles. "Override the jump plate, this location. Yank the fail-safes."
"We can do that," said the voice of Control. "Not a good idea, though. If you-"
"Just do it, Control!"
"Okay, sure. Bite my head off, why don't you. It's done."
Dredd made a mental note to find out who was on duty in Control these days. The backchat was crossing the line to the point where a reprimand was in order. If not a boot up the drokking ass.
For the moment, he slapped the switch in his Lawmaster's micro-console that would trigger the jump plate, which shot into the air, taking the Lawmaster and Dredd with it.
Embedded into the basic architectural structure of Mega-City One were items that only members of the Justice Department could use. There were fast-tracks running parallel to the Interways and access hatches to hab-blocks, to efficiently deliver a Judge precisely where he needed to go.
The jump-plate was a null-grav elevator designed to deposit a Judge and his bike on the Cantilever City trading platform.
With the fail-safes off, the Lawmaster shot past the platform entirely, to the tune of several hu
ndred metres. At the apogee of its lift, Dredd hit another control, tripping the one-shot detonation-thrusters designed to give it boost when jumping over obstacles.
The Lawmaster leapt upwards again. As it reached the top if its arc, Dredd swung his boots onto the saddle and jumped, gaining the final, crucial impetus to bring a girder in the Cantilever City support-structure within reach of an outflung hand.
Behind him the Lawmaster fell, tumbling, to glance off Carlos Ezquerra and smash into the trading platform below.
Dredd hauled himself up onto the girder. He was on the same approximate level as the perp, who was now bringing his Screaming Meatgun up and around to loose a round of plasma-slugs at him.
"Stomm!" Dredd hauled his respirator from a belt pouch and smacked it over his lower face, rendering his uniform effectively airtight.
The polycarbonate body-armour armature inside the Judge's uniform had recently been upgraded with an inset tracery of statically-charged microfilaments to mask the biometric signatures to which Meatgun slugs were so attracted. And with the respirator on, the last breath of Dredd's humanity was concealed.
The plasma-slugs hesitated in the air and then shot downwards. More bad luck for the people below, but it couldn't be helped.
Time to go to work.
In the Justice Department-approved propaganda holo-vids, there was a way these situations always went:
The psycho-perp is blasting away, gibbering psychotically all the while, when Heroic Judge arrives on the scene. Heroic Judge is then very careful to shout: "Stop in the name of the Law! This is your last warning! Be aware that you have voided any subsequent claim under the Health and Safety Statutory Procedures of Mega-City One!"
The perp, of course, ignores this and carries on firing - shouting how he'll never be taken alive and so forth - until his head is spectacularly blown off by a single well-aimed shot courtesy of Heroic Judge.
Then a graceful fall of the body from its vantage point and onto a vehicle of some kind, the alarm of which goes off.
This tends to beg the question: just what the drokk does the Heroic Judge think he's doing? Drokking around and wasting time by shouting things - and not to mention practicing his sharp-shooting on a small target like a head - while the perp is busily taking lives all the while and should be taken out as soon as is humanly possible.
Any putative holo-vid audience would have at this point been disappointed, to say the least.
Now that he had a clear line of sight, Dredd pulled his Lawgiver from his boot and pumped three rounds into the perp, aiming for the main mass of the body just to be sure.
There was a decided lack of spasms and agonising screams. The creep just slumped against the flex securing him to the support. Scratch one problem.
The Meatgun was still clutched in a lifeless hand. There was nothing suspicious about this in itself, but Dredd didn't like the idea of leaving a weapon on the body without confirming a clean kill.
He clambered over the support structure, dropping down onto the perp's vantage point and placing a finger on the body's neck. Micro-sensors in his gauntlet relayed the message to a small readout in his helmet that there was no pulse. Hardly surprising, given the state of the creep's chest. There was nothing left in there capable of producing one.
Dredd pulled the dormant Meatgun from the nerveless fingers and set it aside and out of the way against a girder. He cast around, looking for a way down to the trading platform below, and found none.
"Control?" he said. "The situation's under control. Have Tactical Response pick me up in the Manta when it comes. There's no way down."
He thought about this for a moment, looking around himself again. "There's something odd about this," he told Control.
"What's odd about it, Dredd?" asked the voice of Control. "The guy was committing suicide by Judge - he wasn't expecting to come down. Not in one piece, anyway."
"Yeah, but I can't see any easy way he could have got up here in the first place," said Dredd. "Not without access to a flier - and something like that should have been picked up any number of ways. I had to do something... noticeable... to get up here myself."
He looked down at the body again. "This creep is supposed to have managed to do it bare-handed and toting a Screaming Meatgun. I don't think so. I think someone actively placed him here. Have somebody check it out."
"Will do," said the voice of Control. "The Manta should be on the scene in two minutes, give or take. Message for you from the Chief Judge, by the way. You're pulled off regular patrol as of now and she wants you to meet with her ASAP."
Dredd frowned. "Any idea what it's about?"
"On the skinny it just says a 'sensitive and diplomatic matter'," said the voice of Control. "Bit of a stretch for you, there, Dredd, on a couple of counts."
Down below, a number of private-sector med-teams had made the scene. They'd have maybe a couple of minutes before the Justice Department Med-Division arrived, so they'd be making the best of them.
At least they'd leave the survivors alone, Dredd thought. A recent zero tolerance programme of punitive measures had put paid to that, but any number of bodies were going to be spirited swiftly away.
A number of those who could afford it were going to receive transplanted and untraceable body parts, and soon there would be a few more Screaming Meatguns on the street.
Fortunately for those who might care, the Tactical Response Manta finally arrived. It fired a couple of tracer-rounds and the private-sector meds took off like a pack of startled jackals.
The Manta banked in the air and headed towards Dredd, working its way up through the Cantilever City substructure.
"Here comes your ride, Dredd," the voice of Control said.
"Yeah," said Dredd. "Nice of them to finally turn up."
"Hey, you're the point-man. That's the point of street-patrol. Something happens, you go in and then you tell us what you need."
A number of responses crossed Dredd's mind, largely concerned with the subject of eggs, issued to grandmothers for the sucking of, but he never got the chance to speak, because it was at that point that the body of Leon Gregor Sturlek reached out and clutched at him with a crabbed hand.
"Drokk!" Dredd was caught completely off balance. Grud alone knew there were ways these days that a body could live on in some form after apparent physical death, but there had been no sense whatsoever that this creep Sturlek was still alive and any kind of threat.
There was still no sense of something living. No sense of possession, of the sort that had once caused so many problems to Mega-City One at the hands of the dead-raiser, Sabbat. And yet the body was still, for some strange reason, managing to move.
Dredd stumbled and recovered. The clutching hand fell away from him as though, having achieved its purpose, clutching was no longer necessary.
The body of Sturlek hung slumped and silent, dead as it had been.
Then the head jerked up again.
The chest and lungs hitched and spasmed, air sucking through the holes blown in them. The throat convulsed and the muscles around the mouth twitched. It was as though something had taken control of the body, somewhat ineptly, and was using it to move only those parts of it that it had to and nothing more.
The mouth worked, the tongue spasming within it, modulating air blown up from ruined lungs and a malfunctioning throat.
"Isss noghreal..." the body of Sturlek said. "Isss a choghpy of whassgh reelgh an so noghingh counts likgh issa reelghing... isss whasagh maghin ussagh doo..."
"What?" said Dredd.
The body slumped again into inertia, like a puppet with its strings cut. Whatever had animated it had gone. Dead meat once again - and this time, hopefully, finally dead.
The Manta had drawn level with Dredd. A hatch gull-winged open in its side.
"We're taking the body into Med-Division," Dredd told the Tactical Response Judges inside. "I want them to run every test they've got. There's something strange happening here, stranger than usual even fo
r Crazy Season, and I'm going to find out what."
TWO
"If I were to answer the following question: 'What is slavery?' and I should answer in one word, 'Murder!' my meaning would be understood at once. No further argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: 'What is property?' may I not likewise answer 'Theft'?"
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Qu'est-ce que la Propriété?
In his plush apartments in the Shangri La Towers, Barnstable Wheems surfaced into consciousness, knitting his sense of self together from the desiccated, aching skeins of a hangover.
Possession of alcohol was, of course, illegal in Mega-City One under the Antisocial Behaviour Statutes, but the prohibition was not actively enforced save in a Crime Blitz, when it was added to the total of crimes the luckless target had committed. And if your number came up for a Crime Blitz, you'd be going down no matter what happened.
Besides, if you paid enough, you could obtain a wide variety of Synthahols, chemically altered and constantly re-modified to give all the effect while escaping Justice Department detection entirely.
It was knowing such tricks, keeping one step ahead of the Law - often on a second-by-second basis - that allowed one Barnstable Wheems to make his living as a lawyer.
There were any number of those among the hideously wealthy - with the accent on the hideous - who would pay through the nose to prevent their activities throwing a blip on the Justice Department sonar. All you had to do was try not to mind how slimy your hands got in the taking of it.
And that, in the end, was the reason why he drank. Genuine article or not, the booze blunted the sense of worthlessness and selling out.
