Psykogeddon

by Dave Stone

  For some reason, it was later said, only the Judges of Mega-City One were immune to the influences of this disturbance. That was not strictly true. A number of Judges suffered homicidal psychotic episodes along with everybody else - they just had more opportunity to call it something else and get away with it.

  And more deaths, and more, and ever more. The rate was increasing rapidly. It was not impossible to imagine, if this were left unchecked, an entire population winnowing itself down, by degrees, until a single man was left, whereupon he would, in all probability, kill himself.

  In a room, hung with a variety of artificial human figures, Jonathan Michael Stobie manipulated the limbs of a genuine wooden artist's marionette into a vaguely ballet-like pose. It is a question of attitude, he thought, a question of posture. The moving of a hand through a specific and consciously thought-out trajectory.

  It was simple. Life was simple, if you only supplied the correct answers, either verbally or by way of body language. He remembered, when he was a child, how the juve-psychologist had laid out all these cards with pictures on them. He had been supposed to make up a story about them.

  He had been quite proud of his story, which had involved a man jumping into a pool to save a little girl, and then giving her the kiss of life... and it had been a completely different story from the one he had made up in his head.

  He studied the wooden doll for a while, then turned his attention to the thing on the bed. His latest acquisition, picked up in the Sector Three Smokatorium twelve hours before. He pulled back the polythene sheet.

  It twitched under his gently exploring hand, and then coughed. Its eyes opened onto black, encrusted holes. His latest acquisition whimpered, possibly in anticipation of what was going to happen next without a visual cue as to what it might be.

  Jonathan Michael Stobie leaned forward, preparing to make the ham-string cuts that would make it easier to get his acquisition onto a position more or less matching that of the wooden marionette.

  With enormous force, a hand shot out from the thing on the bed. It was enough to snap the straps that had restrained it, and certainly enough to plunge a stiffened finger into Jonathan Michael Stobie's exposed throat. And that was the last he knew.

  "You're insane, Drago San," Dredd snarled. "You're drokking sick!"

  "And this is news?" said Efil Drago San sardonically. "I seem to recall us spending several hours in a hearing to establish just that precise point. And on any level playing field, that point is in actual fact valid. When a person is innately incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, it might or might not become necessary to deal with him, but terms of actual blame cannot and should not be attached."

  "You know what evil is," Dredd said. "You get off on it. You're stone cold drokking evil to the bone!"

  "And so?" said Drago San. "Let me tell you something - and bear with me, because it really does lead to something with a bearing on an actual point. Centuries ago, before the development of clone-matter grafts and forced regeneration made the issue nonexistent, there was a significant minority of people who went in for some quite horrifying, to a certain frame of mind, elective surgeries. People who were absolutely convinced that they were occupying the wrong bodies.

  "I'm not talking about gender reassignment, of course. The fluidity inherent in the processes of building a functioning phenotype from a genotype means that ending up as the wrong sex is a perfectly common event - and something that can be reset, these days, or for that matter experimented with just for the hell of it, by a short course of retrogenic tablets.

  "No. I'm talking about those who were deluded to believe that the biological age of their bodies was wrong - this was before the rejuve-processes that could reset the biological clock itself - and went through procedures that altered the grosser physical aspects of age, while in actual fact accelerating the destruction of still-viable cells. Peeling off safely dead and protective layers of skin, for example, to expose apparently fresher-looking layers. They couldn't get it through their heads that a biological organism only gets so many layers in its natural span.

  "There were others, also, who attempted to modify their bodies drastically, in an effort to make them conform to the body-image in their heads. Not just by the way of piercings and tattoos, some would contrive to mutilate themselves, actively and irreversibly, even to the point of amputating entire limbs."

  "Get to the drokking point, Drago San," growled Dredd. The current situation made the subject of amputating limbs something of a sore one.

  "The point being," said Drago San, "that the physical and medical implications of missing a limb, or having a face fall off for that matter, are precisely the same whether the person concerned did it to themselves or not. Small-minded individuals, however, felt justified in sanctimoniously judging these people, even to the point of withholding necessary assistance, on the basis that they were culpable and deserved everything they got.

  "You'll find that kind of holier-than-thou attitude throughout history, and often with the most specious of justifications... good freedom fighters and bad terrorists, good and bad AIDS, the atrocities committed, historically speaking, by so-called honest citizens upon the wretches in the stocks; the murder of family-planning counsellors, on the basis that all life is sacred so they have it coming - or for that matter, the terrorising of medical doctors because the best brains involved got all confused about the meaning of the world paediatrics..."

  They were still in the Med Station, Dredd still cuffed to Drago San.

  Initially, Dredd had thought that Drago San had been planning to cut himself free from him and simply kill him. Apparently, this was not to be the case.

  "Do try to think things through, Dredd," Drago San told him. "If the little... procedure I have in mind works, you'll be in a state to be of considerable use, as opposed to the dead weight you are at the moment. Can't have you scampering off and leaving me to my own devices.

  "Besides, so long as I'm cuffed to you like this, I'm still directly and absolutely in your custody. That works both ways. As long as I'm in your custody, and presenting no immediate threat, you can't kill me in cold blood - indeed, you'll have to do your utmost to keep me alive."

  "You used that argument back in the Boranos system," Dredd reminded him. "And then you turned around and tried to kill us all."

  "Oh, hardly," said Drago San. "Not directly, in any case."

  "You tried to commandeer Justice One and left myself, the crew and Psi-Judge Karyn stranded on a planetoid to starve to death."

  "Yes, well," Drago San said. "It wasn't as if I were holding a gun to your heads. And with judicious use of your... resources, who knows how long you might have survived, waiting for someone to notice you and pick you up? Some of you, at least."

  Thoughts on the subject of cannibalism were, at this point, distressingly apposite to say the least.

  Dredd was currently plugged, by way of subdermal electrodes, into the Med Station's portable dermal-regenerator, which was in turn slaved back via data-leads into the workings of Efil Drago San's paraplegic floater.

  The floater's self-repair capabilities were nanonetic in nature, operating on the same principles as a ReFAB unit. Its internal workings were almost infinitely reconfigurable to a variety of templates - thus explaining why any number of its extra features had completely escaped some quite intensive Justice Department scans. They simply hadn't been there at the times when the floater had been scanned.

  The floater's rep had boosted the power of the dermal-regenerator to the point where it was capable of repairing Dredd's damaged nervous system - at least well enough, and long enough, for them to make it out of the Psyko-Block alive.

  The "cannibalistic" aspect of the procedure, however, lay in what was bridging the gap between the regenerator and Dredd: human tissue, from the med-tech Drago San had killed, material that the GIGO-processes of matter-refabrication could break down and use.

  Fortunately, this tissue sample did not have to be any
thing more extreme than a pack of extracted blood. Using it was no more reprehensible, almost, Dredd supposed, than if it had been possible to use the genetically-cleaned plasma from the Med Station chiller.

  If he kept telling himself that, he might even come to halfway believing it.

  The process, though, had given Efil Drago San an idea, one which Dredd had flatly vetoed. This was what the current argument was about.

  "...and the point is," said Efil Drago San, "that there really are worse things in the world than evil. There is nothing more repugnant than smug, self-satisfied 'good' doing what it's positively convinced is its duty.

  "The worst things are the self-important, self-righteous morons and prigs who do evil under the delusion that it's right. Or in this case, refuse to countenance an act that is simply, self-evidently and pragmatically right out of moral turpitude and squeamishness.

  "Think it through in your own terms, Dredd. Our Doctor Robert is currently plunging your City into chaos by means of his psychic bomb-"

  "A psychic bomb that you had him putting together in the first place!" Dredd snapped.

  "Here and now," said Drago San, "that's neither here nor there. The fact remains, here and now, that you don't stand a hope in hell of stopping him without weapons. And here and now, where else can we possibly be getting a weapon from?"

  "How the drokk did you get in here?" Psi-Judge Karyn demanded, after Detective Judge Treasure Steel had produced her warrant card and Karyn had let her up off the floor. "The city's going crazy out there, Sectors Two through Nine. Some kind of neurological contaminant is causing people to flip out wholesale, it's spreading like wildfire and the whole of Psi-Division's supposed to be on Quarantine Alert while we try to find a way of stopping it."

  "I have my methods," said Detective Judge Steel. "Only, I'm not going to tell you about some of them. You'll have to actively pull them out of my head - and I expressly refuse permission for you to do that."

  "Suit yourself," said Karyn. "I couldn't care less. What the drokk is it you want?"

  "I just want to talk," said Steel. "I've got what might be useful information in this current problem of yours, what with your city going crazy. All right, with your city going crazier. And by all accounts, you're a useful person to tell it to."

  Karyn was no-nonsense enough of a Judge to recognise the plain fact that the Brit-Cit Detective Judge was not merely yanking her chain, and that what she had to say might help.

  "Okay, spill," she told Treasure Steel. "What have you got?"

  "The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber," said Treasure Steel. "The adjudication board for the hearing of Efil Drago San, are dead. Killed by the self-administration of what was basically a nanonetically-based neural accelerator - it sent what was left of their nervous-systems into overdrive and blew them apart. Apparently, they thought they were injecting themselves with customised Stookie-extract, a rejuve-shot more powerful than anything else you'll find in the known universe.

  "The accelerator was provided by Drago San, as a 'reward', via his lawyer, Barnstable Wheems. Wheems survived the blast. I was able to... interrogate him. Well, quite frankly, I just kept kicking him in the head until he told me what I wanted to know. He'll probably live. It might be a good idea to get him some medical attention quite soon, though.

  "The whole purpose of Efil Drago San's hearing, apparently, was to see that he ended up in the Mega-City Psyko-Block, while having the Justice Department think it was all their idea. I discovered this when I finally got around to calling my boss back in Brit-Cit - and he was as surprised to find I was here discovered as I was to find he didn't know a thing about it. The whole thing was a setup from start to finish.

  "To perform his part in this, Barnstable Wheems was subjected to some quite sophisticated mental conditioning... Do you see where I'm going with this? Little bit suspicious, don't you think, what with the population of every surrounding Sector suddenly experiencing what you might call mental problems?"

  Psi-Judge Karyn scowled. "Give us some credit. Don't you think that was the first thing we checked up on, purely on the basis of an obvious association of ideas? The Psyko-Block sec-systems reported no problem."

  Detective Judge Treasure Steel snorted. "Instant bleeding Justice. Do it fast and do it hard and just don't think about it. Tell you what, would you do something for me? You know, just as a favour?"

  "What sort of favour?" asked Karyn guardedly.

  "You know, just as a favour. Why don't you call up the Psyko-Block sec-system reports and read them properly. I'll bet you credits to day-old crêpes that what it actually says is something like: 'No problems here, none at all. And if anyone happens to be pulse-pumping out a psionic signal that's making entire Sectors flip out and go ape shit, it certainly isn't us. Honest'."

  EIGHTEEN

  "The figure performed its purpose admirably. Keeping perfect time and step, and holding its little partner tight clasped in an unyielding embrace, it revolved steadily, pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of squeaky conversation, broken by brief intervals of grinding silence."

  - Jerome K Jerome

  The Dancing Partner

  In her private offices off from the public chamber in which the hearing of Efil Drago San had taken place, Chief Judge Hershey pored somewhat desperately over the death count figure streaming through her data-pad.

  "Tens of thousands," she muttered, "and accelerating exponentially."

  "If I can bring the subject up yet again," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "without, you know, having my head bitten off, I really think it's time we considered biting the bullet and going into big lie mode."

  Hershey sighed. "The physical infrastructure is still in place?"

  "Of course," said SJS-Judge Slithe. "Purely in readiness for the eventuality that it might ever be needed again, naturally. There have even been a number of maintenance upgrades over the years, apparently."

  "I'll just bet there have been." Hershey sighed again. "Just what are we talking about here? Run it by me."

  "Blanket-tranques and stumm-gas," said Slithe. "Riot-foam to deal with core disturbances, Mantas stationed around the perimeter, weapons packages set on auto-fire to deal with targets attempting to leave their designated area..."

  "And when does the body count for that stop exceeding the body count we've got?" said Hershey.

  "We're talking in terms of less than an hour," said Slithe.

  "Oh Grud," said Chief Judge Hershey. "So, basically, we're less than an hour away from one of the worst disasters to strike the city, or precipitating one of the worse active atrocities. If we could only-"

  It was at this point that her personal communicator on the desk began to peal. Since it had been set to allow only those calls of the utmost importance, Hershey nearly fumbled it in trying to snatch it up.

  "Yeah?" she said. "This had better be... Psi-Judge Karyn? Yeah, Karyn, what is it you want?"

  Overhead, the ion-shield was going through one of its periodic malfunctions. The stuttering light was like two jagged slivers of Plexiglas hammered straight into the living brain behind the eyes. At least, that's how it seemed to the eyes of Mona Valdez.

  This was an area of Sector Three given over to transit stacks: thousands of credit-operated self-contained living modules lashed to scaffolding, originally intended as cheap spillover accommodation for passengers and transients using the Mega-City/Brit-Cit Bore. The shuttles hadn't run for more than a year now. Something about how Mega-City One and Brit-Cit had stopped being friends, so easy travel between the two had been suspended. Mona didn't know the details and didn't care.

  It was that magic time of the night when the stacks seemed dormant, almost deserted. The night-people gone off about their business, the day-people curled up asleep or staring, muscle-locked and speeding away on methamphetamine. Mona stumbled through the ground level, giggling a little, heading for the ladder to the capsule that she currently called home.

  The gaiety was entirely physical
and automatic. Her body was just doing it; she wasn't feeling anything either way. She had ended her shift at the synthahol-bar hours before and a customer had wanted to party. Middle grade exec-type, working for one of the control-incorp subsidiaries. Seemed he was a good customer, a very special client. Volana had gone along with it like a shot, and basically, one Mona Valdez better go along with it too if she wanted to keep her credit fix.

  It hadn't been a total loss. The very special client had access to some serious Janies, and Janies went with everything. It was funny how the Judges kept on saying how they were narcotics, like they were endorphin triggers or something. Endorphin triggers screwed you up, and Janies weren't like that at all. They made you bigger, in your head, like you knew everything. Like you could see everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be, and it was like it was all made of these little jewels and filled with love.

  They made you feel like a goddess.

  Until the point when you come down off them, of course. Mona had pulled out of the crash somewhere out there on the city Wall Orbital, on a cattle truck road train, sandwiched between the partition and some human dosser pressing the crusty growth on his bald grey head into the side of her neck.

  She had started laughing and couldn't stop. It was just the residual, vestigial effect of the drug. Her credit tags were gone from her pouch, but in the mindless chaos of finding her way home, back here through the morning rush-hour, she had begun to wonder whether she had ever got them or not. One thing was for sure, though, if nothing else was. Volana would have already taken her cut. Volana would have taken it right off the top.