Psykogeddon

by Dave Stone

  A small occasional table, the scorched and crazed varnish on its top still showing vestiges of a partridge and peacock-feather inlay.

  A wooden tea chest filled to the brim with a tangled collection of wire spectacle-frames.

  A crucifix, from which the little man has fallen, leaving only one pale leg behind, screwed to the wood.

  A bakelite radio with the majority of its innards missing...

  And any number of other, apparently random items, all clotted with the ichorous slime that the inhabitants of the bubble-world constantly exude. We shall call these inhabitants the Slaarg, purely for the sake of something to call them, although that is certainly not their proper name, which cannot be heard by human ears and is unimaginable to the human mind.

  The chamber is alive with Slaarg, a seething mass of them in a variety of sizes and states of development. Slaarg begin life as spores and exist in a state of continual growth, feeding on the slime exuded by the larger of their fellows and the bodies of those smaller they can catch.

  They are metamorphic, their skeletons telescopic, enclosed by viscera the consistency of mud and, in turn, enveloped by a muscle and a carapace of chitinous platelets. Within their basically obloid forms they carry a full component of sensory and manipulatory appendages. They can assume new forms more or less at will - none of them particularly pleasant.

  Off to one side, perched on the bulk of an overturned nineteenth century Victrola, something the size of a rat, with an extensible and yawning mouth, envelops something the same general shape as a lobster. The plated mass of the devourer ripples, momentarily, then suddenly constricts with a muffled yet perfectly audible crunch. A blast of acidic vapour shoots from a sphincter-vent, scorching the wood of the Victrola and raising bubbles on the varnish.

  The continual frenzy of feeding and being fed upon seems to be prompting a kind of accelerated evolution as the immature Slaarg attempt new and tentative shapes to gain some small advantage. Something snakelike with the pseudo-hood of a cobra strikes repeatedly at something that, briefly, tries a generally insectoid form. A kind of animated mantrap writhes in agony as it is pecked apart by a flock of birdlike forms, connected by a tangle of fleshy tubes and in fact a single Slaarg organism...

  ...and on and on, in every combination. All in all, it's a sight that might put even H P Lovecraft off his calamari and chips.

  None of it is noticed by the hulking forms in the centre of the chamber. Slaarg only achieve what passes for sentience at a certain size, and the feeding frenzy going on around them is as unimportant and unnoticeable - if, occasionally, as annoying - as the buzzing of insects.

  The largest of these Slaarg, the Dominator, has produced a collection of surprisingly delicate-looking pseudopodia and is brushing them, speculatively, against an apparently empty patch of humid air. The ends of the tentacles seem, in some manner, to fade into nothingness - though whether that is because they divide and sub-divide at their ends in a fractal manner that means their ends are ultimately and effectively infinite, or whether they are in actual fact disappearing into some other dimension, it is impossible to say.

  Interesting... The Dominator says, in a manner that has about as much relation to the forming of audible words as a denial-of-service DataNet spam-attack has to an item of junk mail pushed through a letterbox. You tell me, my Scientificator that there is some new instability within the Dimensional Rift ?

  The Slaarg, who has taken on the form of a cerebellum the size of an elephant, extends an eye on a stalk and turns it in the direction of its Dominator:

  O Grand High Dominator of the Nine Known Dimensions! On whose stout and mighty axis those dimensions spin! All hail he whose smallest pseudopodium has ground continents to dust and from whom every utterance is a profound and roaring wind. O Dominator, from whom issues a bright and most effulgent radiance, as if from - [interrupt]

  I believe, says the Dominator, that a slightly less formal mode of address might be permissible, just this once. Otherwise we could be here all squeem.

  Right you are, squire. says the Scientificator. Now you'll remember this here chamber is the site of what you might be calling an ontological instability. Over the decasqueems it's been throwing out all manner of crap. Stuff we don't have the first clue about what it is and how it's used. We've never quite been able to get a clear sensorial-complex of what's beyond it - I mean the crap that comes though could have just been spontaneously generated, completely at random, for all we knew...

  Go on, Scientificator says the Dominator.

  Now there seems to have been some change from within, says the Scientificator. The basic nature of the Multiverse is, basically, tied into the processes of sentient consciousness on the quantum level. Something has shifted, beyond the Dimensional Rift. We are able to detect creatures in the world beyond. The world beyond, in fact, is infected with them.

  Infested, eh? says the Dominator.

  Infested, says the Scientificator. Crawling with them. A variety of primate. Filthy little things. Leaking biological contaminants out of every pore and orifice of their bodies, pulsing psychoneurological waste from every synapse in what passes for their brains. Direct contact would, I am very much of the opinion, be fatal.

  The Dominator regards the Dimensional Rift thoughtfully - or at least, contemplates the sense-input from its sensory tentacles, as they probe at apparent nothingness, in a clinically dispassionate manner.

  Fatal? it says. For us or them?

  Both, ultimately, says the Scientificator. What with the degree of cross-contamination and all. You're probably picking up a whole bunch of secondary micro-resonances as we do what to physically speaking is a macroturgle to a squeem.

  The Dominator's sensory pseudopodia whip back from the dimensional rift as if they have been stung.

  This won't do, says the Dominator. This won't do at all. Scientificator, keep a sensory-apparat on events beyond the Dimensional Rift. The first sign of destabilisation, dispatch an Assimilation Drone. Sterilise this other world of its human filth immediately.

  I shall give the orders, my Dominator. All shall be arranged. It shall be done. The bulk of the Scientificator collapses in on itself and reforms into a complex arrangement of planes with fractal-ragged edges, as it conveys said orders and arrangements to its various minions - the equivalent of technicians - in other, nearby bubbles of the bubble-universe.

  The Dominator, for its part, manoeuvres its hulking form through the chamber, heading for the tunnels which, with suitable locomotive assistance from its retinue, will take it back to the rather more extensive complex of chambers that serves it as a stronghold.

  Idly, feeling the need for a small snack, it turns an eye-stalk to regard a smugly well-fed, immature Slaarg perched on top of a big brass barometer with a needle permanently stuck on "blustery". It shoots out, from its main mass, a kind of bone grappling-hook trailing a length of thin tendon.

  The speared immature Slaarg squeals and attempts to resist by planting a sucker. The big brass barometer falls over with a clash and a splay of ichorous sludge. The immature Slaarg is dragged, big brass barometer and all, into a gaping sphincter-maw, ringed with teeth, that the Dominator has opened up especially for the purpose.

  THIRTEEN

  "Away, then, with these Lewd, Ungodly Diversions, and which are but Impertinence at the best. What part of impudence, either in Words or Practice, is omitted by the Stage. Don't the Buffoons take almost all manner of Liberties, and Plunge through Thick a
nd Thin, to make a Jest?"

  - St Clement of Alexandria

  Works

  The effects of the psycholeptic pulse had been building for months, subtly damaging the neurosystems of those in the Sectors surrounding Sector One.

  Initially, this had merely led to an increase in mental illness, an escalation of random acts of violence, or served to trigger specifically structured varieties of psychosis in certain pre-damaged individuals who had been carefully manoeuvred into positions where they could make the most impact, or cause the maximum of confusion and damage when they flipped out into mania.

  Now, however, the influence of the psycholeptic pulse jumped several entire orders of magnitude...

  In Shangri La Towers, in an intimate little bistro-chamber, the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe smoked an arch cigarette - of a camomile and modified-cannabis mix that would still be technically legal for another two hours - and regarded the man seated opposite her with flat distaste.

  The man, an uncouth lout by the name of Joey Malish, was nothing more in life than a chauffeur-for-hire, and had no prospects of ever bettering himself into anything else. Not that this was automatically to be despised, Lady Tamara allowed, being, she believed, staunchly egalitarian to the core. Slumming it with a bit of rough had been, after all, part of the attraction in her involvement with him.

  Now, however, certain factors meant that the attraction of the affair had most definitely begun to pall.

  "It was out of my way to come here, you know," Malish now said. "I'm completely off my level."

  "Myself, too," said Lady Tamara. "Ordinarily, one would rather be seen dead than in a low-class 'joint', as I believe you and your 'mates' are inclined to call such an establishment as this. I simply didn't want either of us to be seen where we might be recognised. We have things to talk about, Joseph."

  "That we do, ma'am," said Malish with heavy sarcasm, miming a little pull on a nonexistent peaked cap.

  He glanced at Lady Tamara's cigarette, and at the glass of high-strength customised synthahol before her. "Do you think you should be doing that? You know it's a bad idea to drink and smoke when you're..."

  "When I'm what, precisely, Joseph?" asked Lady Tamara sweetly. "Who says I'm anything?"

  "But you told me..." Malish trailed off as the implication of what she was saying hit him. "You mean you've...?"

  "No I haven't," Lady Tamara said. "Not yet, at least. My point is that, until I decide what I'm going to do about it, nothing has happened. This could be the last drink I take and cigarette I smoke for quite a while. Or it might not. That's my decision. It has nothing to do with you."

  "Now hang on-" Malish began, but the Lady Tamara overrode him.

  "No, no, Joseph," she said. "You hang on. I happen to like my life, Joseph. I like the clothes and the hangers-on and the credits - I'm rather shallow in that respect, I suppose.

  "Certain things are... necessary to that life, and some are disposable. Some of them I get to decide whether or not to keep."

  "But you can't just leave me out of the picture," Malish said. "You can't just... oh. You're not talking about the other. Leaving me out of the picture is the thing you're talking about."

  Lady Tamara smiled coldly. "Precisely, Joseph. Whatever I decide about the other, you are at the moment a complication I simply don't need... and I'm certainly not going to let you spoil things with my Fluffy - I mean, Lord Whelpington.

  "So this is the deal. If you'll bother to check your credit-account, you'll find that this week I deposited... well, let's just say that so far as you're concerned, compared with what you're used to, it's quite a substantial sum."

  "Now listen here," Malish snapped. "If this is your idea of trying to buy me off..."

  The lady Tamara waved an airy hand. "Nothing of the sort," she said. "Keep it, spend it, give it to the poor or pour it down your neck in the form of that low-quality synthahol you and your kind drink - I couldn't care less. I spend more on shoes, quite frankly.

  "The important thing, Joseph, is that the cred-records say I paid it."

  She regarded him with cold impassiveness. "If you make any kind of fuss," she continued, "if it even seems to me that you're going to make any kind of fuss, then, well, I'm going to have to show those records to my Fluffy - I beg your pardon, Lord Whelpington - and confess everything." She smiled. "And do you know what I'm going to tell him?"

  Malish shrugged sullenly, sensing immanent defeat. "What are you going to tell him?"

  "I'm going to say that some months back, when you drove me home to Shangri La from a certain charity event in Sector Twelve, you assaulted me. You were quite... violent and brutal about it, told me you would kill me if I said a word. I was terrified and confused, not quite in my right mind, so I kept it from my Fluffy - my Lord Whelpington. We were going through a bad patch in any case, and I was afraid that this would be the end.

  "I thought I could put it behind me, but then you developed a twisted obsession with me. You began stalking me, sending me little notes and presents - I can produce all the evidence I need, if I need to. I tried to pay you off, but you still refused to leave me alone. So in the end I was forced to go to my Fluffy and tell him everything."

  "You bitch!" Malish roared, leaping to his feet with sufficient force to send his rustically-designed chair skidding back across the faux-parquet flooring. "You think you can get away with something like that? Well you probably can, with your position, and your money, and your connections - but I'll tell you this for nothing. I'm gonna fight. I might go down, but I'm gonna go down fighting and making a stink all the way!"

  He stood there, breathing heavily, grating at the Lady Tamara.

  The Lady Tamara, for her part, regarded him with a sense of complete equanimity.

  "I take it that's your final word on the subject?" she said.

  "Yeah," said Malish. "That's my final word."

  "Very well then."

  The Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe snatched up an unused fish knife - the fish course having not by this point arrived - and flung herself over the table, her face a snarling rictus of pure animal bloodlust and rage. She grabbed Malish's face with one clawed hand and then wrenched downwards - leaving deep, blood-spraying gouges rather than mere scratches, and bursting one of his eyes.

  Then, as Malish hitched in breath to shriek in agony, before he could even bring his hands up to his ruined face, the Lady Tamara plunged the fish knife into his remaining eye, to bury it deep inside the brain.

  Malish spasmed and jerked, then sighed and collapsed bonelessly.

  If the altercation between Malish and the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe had caused some degree of consternation among the other patrons and the waiters of the bistro, these last events had provoked absolute and unbelieving shock.

  The Lady Tamara sat calmly back down again and took a genteel sip of her drink. "Nothing to worry about," she said, with perfect calm. "This isn't real. It's just a copy. So it doesn't count."

  Those who had never been in the Mega-City Kook Kubes tended to think of them as a bedlam horror show out of a slasher holo-vid. The place from which the psycho escapes before terrorising a hab-block populated entirely by, uncommonly enough, well-built girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one who don't wear many clothes. Or alternatively, in a few cases, the place where a number of well-built girls, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, find themselves locked in for the night during a power cut.

  Crumbling plaster walls that might once have been white, but any white that remains is merely to set off the smears of blood and excrement. Rusting iron cages containing the ragged and shadowy forms of gibbering, whooping maniacs. Brutal lard-assed orderlies, who, if anything, are worse than the inmates - who they spend their time butt-drokking in the cells, in the ablutions and pretty much everywhere else. Wild-eyed doctors, who if anything are worse than the orderlies, creeping around the corridors and looking for anyone at all to use their ECT-machines on.

  This, at least, w
as the common conception of conditions inside the Mega-City Psyko-Block, and the Justice Department encouraged it, possibly because, if people knew what the inside of the Kook Kubes was actually like, and if you survived the Judicial process long enough to get there in the first place, citizens would be flipping out at the drop of a tinfoil-lined hat.

  The plain fact was that, while space and building resources might be limited in the Mega-City, advanced construction and molecular-refab techniques meant that when something was actually built, it was easier to make it perfectly suited to its purpose.

  The Psyko-Block was not there, ostensibly at least, to punish the criminally insane. It was there to contain them, even treat them. The very definition of "criminally insane" is a fundamental inability to grasp the criminality of one's actions, or that they deserve punishment. So, simply throwing the criminally insane into a living stommhole is completely counter-productive.

  The entrance hall of the Psyko-Block was bright and airy, the bright and airy space elegantly supported by slim colonnades of refab-marble. Actual genetically-fortified foliage rustled, faint and calm, in the soft cool breeze that stirred the lightly scented and conditioned air. There was the faint tinkle of wind-chimes. It was coming from the ambient sound-system, it seemed, rather than from actual chimes, so as to precisely gauge their calming effect.

  Drago San looked around with barely-concealed delight.

  "Do you know, Dredd," he said, "I believe I could learn to like this place."

  "Yeah, well, wait until they start taking your personality apart to see what makes it tick," said Dredd. "I'm told it makes a Precinct-house interrogation look like a walk through the Arboretum of Assisted Euthanasia."

  "Oh, really?" said Drago San, apparently unconcerned. "Well, fortunately for all of us, I've got quite enough personality to go around."

  Waiting for them at the reception desk, which appeared to have been carved from a single lump of porphyry, were a pair of women wearing nurses' costumes. Although "wearing" was almost entirely the wrong term.