Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  Africa was dying. A hundred thousand children a week were shedding their skins. Ninety per cent died; the rest were hospitalised for life. The antidotes and vaccines were now being distributed, at vast expense; but the wastage of life was appalling. Soon, Africa would have lost a large part of a whole generation of children. It was becoming a continent of ageing men and women who worked three or four or five jobs a week to buy the drugs to lessen the pain of their dying infants and teenagers. The rumours about what was happening were widespread, though entirely underground. And as a result, cynicism was universal. Despair, alcoholism and drug abuse were the national status quo.

  But no one hated the American companies. No one tried to stop what was happening. An entire continent cheerfully accepted its doom. Life was regarded as a sick punishment dreamed up by a hate-filled God.

  My African girl died in the hospital in blinding agony, and was never ever granted an insight into what life could really be like. She missed fun, life, love, babies, everything.

  I got angry. I went home and raged to Peter’s nannies. And I drifted off to sleep with Peter cradled next to me, lulled by the sound of the nanny sleeping in the neighbouring bed (conveniently placed for her nightly feeds.) And as I tried to sleep, I wept, and my tears woke my baby. And he cried. And I suckled him with my dry breasts, first one, then the other, neither yielding milk, until his crying became too intense, and the nanny gently prised him off me.

  Then the next morning, as I was brushing my hair, I felt a hot flush on my cheek. A handful of hair came away in my hands. My cheeks were burning now, and so I looked at myself in the mirror. I was clinically livid, a red swelling balloon. As I watched, my forehead rippled, I was seized by a terrible terrible itch. When I gently touched my face with the tip of my finger, the entire top layer of face skin peeled away in a single piece. I could see my veins now, my skinless face was a red raw horror, my eyeballs throbbed huge.

  I managed to call the hospital before the flesh peeled off my fingers too. An ambulance arrived, two hours later, and I was helped stumbling into the back. The skin of my fingertips was left behind on the door of the ambulance. A tube was inserted in my throat, and for a moment I felt my tongue was going to fall off.

  The ride was bumpy, and terrifying. I was choking, forced to breathe through a tube. I was convinced I was dying. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. After cheating death once, I had run out of credit and I was going to die in appalling agony.

  At the hospital, I was put in a sealed oxygen tent, to keep out contamination from the outside world. The rest of my skin peeled off me in thick sheets, apart from a few patches on my back and the inside of my arms. Doctors came by, stared in at me in horror, then left muttering. I was alone with my thoughts. And I realised what was happening.

  They had got to me. They must have been alerted to my investigation, probably through a routine check of web users, and my name must have been flagged as a threat to their security. The journey from regarding me as a potential distant threat to deciding to eliminate me with biotoxins was staggeringly brief.

  And now I was dying of the dreaded Immuno-Suppressant Plague. It went against the epidemiology of the disease, which was normally both race- and age-specific, usually targeting black children between eight and sixteen. But this mutant version of the plague was now going to kill me, soon, and horribly.

  How did they poison me? A dart fired into my flesh as I walked down the street? A contaminant placed in my air conditioning? I worried away at this as the doctors went to work. They expected me to suffer massive and irretrievable heart failure, because of the enormous extra pressure being put on my system by the trauma of auto-flaying. That was the commonest cause of death in such cases.

  But my new heart was sound as a bell. I lived through the night, though no one thought I would. Then the doctors were convinced I would die of infections, because of my non-existent immunity – the major effect of this Syndrome. And in fact I contracted eleven different infections; seven of them were hospital superbugs which were passed on by a sloppy nurse who handled the oxygen tent on the inside before assembling it. Any one of these infections could have been fatal. I survived them all.

  By this time every last piece of my skin had gone. I felt raw and boiled and the movement of air on my skin was like sandpaper. But I dug deep into my reserves of rage and determination. After a week I had survived pneumonia and TB. My liver failed but I made them transplant a new one. No one expected me to live through the operation but I did. I was clinically dead for about a minute at one point, but my heart pounded back to life of its own accord. Slowly, against all the odds, I pulled through.

  After a few weeks’ recuperation, with no further side effects, the doctors began to accept that a miracle had taken place.

  Then, at my insistence, an experimental polythene spray-on seal was used to coat my entire skinless body, to isolate my flesh from outside contaminants – a thin and invisible plastic coating over my ligaments and nerves.

  With this in place, I started to exercise, to prevent my joints seizing up and becoming paralysed. I used a slow t’ai chi workout to keep my body limber. It was, I know, a frightening sight, this slow-moving Zen-imbued flayed corpse doing her daily kata. But I kept to my routine religiously.

  My team came to see me, and recoiled, but I beckoned them back and made them listen to my rasping demands.

  A few days after that, I was able to use a voice-activated computer to send my emails. My paperwork was projected on a screen. I started working again, running African Aid, while also researching my enemies on Google. And I began plotting my revenge.

  After two weeks I discharged myself and went back to the office. I was able to wear a coverall over my polythene-sealed body. I wore a brightly coloured Venetian carnival mask to hide the horror that was my face. My team were stunned, and unable to speak when I arrived. So I threw them a bag of doughnuts and bitched about how many episodes I’d watched of a dumb sitcom called It’s a Dog’s life on Mars, about a robot dog travelling through ancient Martian civilisations.

  Then I started to make my plan come to life. I had written twenty pages of detailed notes and flowcharts to map out my strategy. It required precision, and sublime boldness.

  In the dead of night, nourished by pizza and french fries and Coke from a vending machine next to my desk, with only a computer and a fiendishly cunning brain as my weapons, I declared war on the entire military-pharmaceutical complex of the USA.

  First, I accessed the President of the United States’ private and personal email account. And I sent an email to him explaining in lucid, persuasive terms that I had invented a virus which would make people 5 per cent less intelligent. I threatened to unleash the virus on American soil unless I received a billion dollars in cash. I sent him comprehensive research findings to prove I could do what I said. And I offered him a sample of the virus as evidence.

  The email wasn’t signed by me of course, nor could it be traced to any computer I had ever owned or operated. Instead, the email was directly trackable back to the university of Michigan, and was signed by the Nobel Prize-winning academic John A. Foley.

  The FBI of course checked it out and quickly discovered that the email was a hoax. Foley was exonerated of any responsibility for these threatening and inane ravings, which were based of course on totally spurious science. Apologies were made. And the identity of the mystery emailer went down in the FBI files as an unsolved mystery.

  But the FBI’s security check was thorough and comprehensive, and it meant that Foley was now on their database, and was hence routinely subjected to security and psychological profiling.

  I then made use of a state-of-the-art firewall cracking “n” hacking software system created by one of our Jo’Burg startup computer companies. With the aid of this powerful tool, I was able to hack into the FBI case files, and access their most heavily classified files. And as a result, I was able to read the newly compiled FBI dossier on Foley – which revealed that he had c
lose associations with a group of businessmen and businesswomen called the Ludds, who specialised in low-tech investment portfolios and had a history of bank frauds. Foley had been receiving six-figure payments from the Ludds for many years. His academic objectivity was totally compromised; he had sold his soul many years before to Big Business.

  Foley was also chief scientific adviser and boffin to Future Dreams, the manufacturers of the Plague. (This I already knew of course – it was the reason I had targeted him.) Foley’s reputation as a scientist and idealist was a sham; he was in this for the money.

  Armed with the information from my FBI database computer hacking, I compiled a list of every board member of Future Dreams and the Ludds. And I emailed every one of them to say that they had been infected by a fast-developing cancer which would sap their personality in slow stages. The first symptom would be depression, sleepless nights, and an unbearable itching sensation.

  Then I cashed in some major endowments and hired an international hitman to murder John A. Foley and make it look like suicide.

  Okay, okay, let’s pause a moment! I know that last bit looks bad. Extremely bad, really – almost enough to turn me from hero to villain in your eyes. And, I must concede, it’s an approach that did give me a few qualms. But I reassured myself with the thought that I was engaged in an all-out war with a ruthless opponent. Millions had died in Africa because of this lab-created Plague; I considered that what these bastards had done was an act of genocide. So I would argue that in such a case, murder doesn’t constitute a crime – it’s merely the appropriate tool for the job.

  You see? Are you persuaded? Hero not villain! Trust me on this.

  The process of hiring a “hitman” was surprisingly easy. I didn’t use any of the gangsters who were so easy to find in the bars near my office. I needed a premier service, which I got by Googling a series of nested encrypted sites. This took me to some truly evil cyberplaces: sites for paedophiles, bestiality chat lines, S amp; M photo galleries. I discovered that if I paid enough money, I could hire someone to be eaten by me. Or, if I preferred, to eat me. Neither option appealed…

  Instead, I opted for what I hoped was a simple murder-for-cash transaction. I met a man in a bar who took money from me and vanished, and I waited a week. Then the same man came back to get the details of the job. I provided dossiers and key information.

  Then I sat back and waited. Eventually, I got a video bulletin on my phone from my news service saying that Foley had been shot to death by a burglar, together with his wife and two children. The burglar had escaped, and there were no clues about his or her identity. It was a flawless “hit”.

  I had killed a man.

  It felt good.

  I had also been responsible for the death of his innocent wife and children. This, after a moment’s reflection, left me feeling stunned, and appalled. What had I become? Was I a monster? A psychopath? Or was I no worse than a politician, who declares a war then has to live with the collateral damage?

  The sleepless nights continued. But the guilt refused to curdle and eat me up; I decided I could live with it. Sometimes, you have to do wrong, in order to do right.

  But then one evening, as I sat in my office, my phone beeped, and I picked up a text asking me to meet a man in a bar. A code word was used; and I realised that this was the assassination service. Money was mentioned… a million dollars, twice as much as the original fee.

  I was terrified now. This was clearly blackmail. It was obvious I was in out of my depth. But I had no one to turn to, no one who could help me. So I dressed myself in an all-over body-armour suit – thin enough that it didn’t show any bulges when I wore my suit over it. I took a knife and a gun, sprayed myself with perfume to hide the “I’m about to shit myself” smell of fear that clung in my nostrils, then I went to see my hitman-turned-extortionist.

  We met in the Shona Bar. He drank orange juice. He kept the glass far from me, so I couldn’t poison it. It was a public place, so I couldn’t threaten him with the gun. And I guessed, from his stance and aura of “don’t fuck with me-ness”, that in any hand-to-hand combat situation, I would die instantly.

  The hitman’s name was George. He apologised for pestering me. He apologised also for the deaths of the wife and kids. They weren’t meant to be there; it was “just one of those things”. And George then explained that the extra money was a one-off payment to cover unexpected expenses. It wasn’t in fact, as I might have thought, blackmail, it wasn’t a try-on. After today I would never see him again.

  It fucking well was blackmail of course, but there was nothing I could do about it. So I gave him the money and never saw him again.

  However, the money was a stash left over from my crime-fighting days. Provided George touched it within twenty-four hours of our meeting, it would release a slow-acting serum into his system that would induce paranoia. I hoped that he would hoard it, and not spend it freely. But I was confident he would count it. They always count the money. Sometimes, I dream of George sinking into a paranoiac slump, racked with fear and unable to cope.

  That’ll teach him for trying to fuck with me.

  The murder of Foley was just another chess move; I had no intention of killing my enemies one by one. My methods were far more guileful. I sent more emails out to the Ludds and the Future Dreams board members citing more details of the personality-sapping cancer, and further suggesting that Foley hadn’t been killed by a burglar at all – he’d gone mad, killed his family, then himself, and the authorities were covering it up.

  And then I began leaking stories to the financial press about the precarious state of Future Dreams finances, pointing out that a cheap antidote to the IS Plague would soon be available, patented by African scientists, blah de blah, blah de blah, the upshot being, this would cut profits, since Future Dreams relied heavily on its trade of selling palliatives for plagues it had bioengineered.

  This leak was repeated verbatim in one of the financial papers. It took some hours before it was spotted that the journalist had inadvertently slandered Future Dreams by accusing them of bioengineering plagues for profit.

  Fearful of a possible damaging legal case, the paper took pre-emptive protective measures. In other words, it authorised an in-depth investigation of Future Dreams, and in particular into the claim that it was bioengineering plagues. Rather to their own astonishment, they quickly found a massive and compelling amount of evidence in support of their original unchecked story. And the scandal broke.

  And once a scandal breaks, in today’s media universe, it really breaks. Journalists were camped out on the lawns of the accused men and women. Pundits held forth on breakfast TV. Topical sitcoms included jokes mocking Future Dreams. It was a media blitz.

  After a few days of this Jeffray Colt, the deputy marketing manager of Future Dreams, committed suicide. His wife explained that he sank into a terrible depression after the death of John A. Foley, and had suffered appalling bouts of itching that had caused him to rub his skin raw. There was in fact no physical cause for this; the itching was brought about purely by the power of my suggestion.

  The next day, Dan Mathers, the head of research and development at Future Dreams, blew himself up in his own laboratory. A day after that, three researchers in the Future Dreams lab drove a car off the Grand Canyon. Journalists besieged the house of Future Dreams CEO Mark Malone, clamouring to hear his response to this spate of deaths. He denied everything, but that night he was admitted to hospital after an overdose, and suffered irreversible brain damage. Three board directors shot each other in a drunken suicide pact. Then Molton Hatcher, leader of the Ludds, confessed to a twenty-year-old bank fraud and hanged himself in his prison cell. Three of his associates hanged themselves in the back room of their local church, though one survived, and died later in hospital after eating his own tongue.

  After a week, twenty-four guilty men and women were dead, all by their own hand.

  And so, primed by my evil mind-fuck emails about the personalit
y-corroding cancer, and fuelled by the press frenzy and the constant TV and newspaper exposes, the suicides became epidemic, as I knew they would. It’s a principle of people-manipulation psychology that high-status individuals under intense stress are highly susceptible to dreams, delusions and paranoias. These men had engineered a plague to decimate Africa; my revenge was to use a metaphorical psychological “plague” to fuck them up in the head.

  It worked. And it was the best kind of justice; only the guilty were driven by their guilt to kill themselves. The innocent were spared. What could be fairer?

  Future Dreams survived; before long the cover-ups began, the fix was in. But we stopped getting new incidents of the IS Plague in Africa. And African leaders, stung by the untrue report in the Western press that their own scientists had patented an antidote to the plague, commissioned their university’s brightest scientist to patent an antidote to something. This resulted, five years later, in a virus that combated the symptoms of and essentially eradicated, MS, ME and diabetes. The resulting profits made Africa rich, and eventually led to a state of affairs where the African Community of Nations was a net lender of money to Western countries, rather than continuing to be a net borrower.

  The political consequences of these deftly planted psych bombs never cease to astound me. I have performed, in my time, marvels that have changed the history of the world. But no one knows of course. That’s my curse; to never get the credit.

  On this occasion, however, I did not care.

  It was four years before a team of scientists managed to graft on my new skin. I went for improved breast implants at the same time, and insisted on tiny laughter lines around my eyes, to alleviate the otherwise overwhelming effect of pure, perfect, glowing young skin.

  On the day my graft took, I booked myself into the Bridal Suite of a 5-star hotel, got drunk on champagne, then lay naked on the bed and stared and stared at myself in the ceiling mirror. I didn’t masturbate, I didn’t sleep. I just spent the night admiring myself. A day before, I had been a flayed monster with bulging eyes who was unable to touch anyone, and whose appearance sent children screaming away.