by Jeff Noon
‘What yer got there, snothead? Is that your brain?’
Nigel Zuze, with two of his cronies from the League of Zero. Sniggering in harmony, blue and cream. ‘He’s one of them that licked us,’ one of them said.
‘Aye,’ the other one said. ‘Fucking Paki-fucker.’
Nigel grabbed the X-rays off Dopejack. ‘Looks dead to me, your brain. Looks stuffed. I think you’re in need of some treatment. Boys…’
A beginning, an ending…
On Thursday also, the brethren buried one of their finest. Much love lost and found was mentioned, fights and curses forgiven. Eddie Irwell was laid out in his long-time hole on St Anne’s Square, the present owner having gracefully given up his rights. Many shoppers and passers-by stopped to ponder this strange, primitive ritual. Spade by spade the earth was replaced in the hole, covering the body. There would be no gravestone, no marker except for a small tree planted in this soil. This would grow over the next twenty-five years, carrying Eddie’s spirit into the next century.
Celia Hobart was not allowed to this ceremony. She was forbidden to leave the safe house in West Didsbury. But later that day, long after darkness had fallen, two people did stop for a while at the grave in the city. One was perhaps nineteen years old, with ragged, short hair, a head full of numbers and pain; the other, a little girl of eight years, with long, straight, metallic-blond hair, in which a green-and-yellow bird’s feather was knotted. Perhaps she mumbled something kind, this child, something regretful; perhaps a curse against the bones and what they had stolen from her. Perhaps, one day, when enough of the homeless have died, the whole of the city will be covered with these trees of green spirit.
A blurbfly circling the grave, at play for once, but with a purpose.
Midnight. Jazir lying alone on his bed in Rusholme, awake but dreaming. Watching the scene at the gravehole far away, through the blurb’s eyes.
Growing wings.
Beginnings, endings. Thursday, becoming Friday.
The day of chances…
Game 45
Mucky jung Doom Day. Dippy mould Unchester. Blow the numbs. Game 45, telling bone natives. Make some pimples, loopyvision. Watch with honey, gamble credits digit-come. Crawling, stalling, numbernauting. Chancing flip, dancing pip; Dalmatian damnation. Domination. Blurb-o-matica, heavy flies, pregnant with babyverts, motherhatching the streets. Play to win some, winsome Moonchester! All over the dirty, shitty, bonefried Fryday, squeeze us some game-juice. Six thoughts from pipflight, how howling the slithy hordes! Clacky doms on dommy clacks, clutched in fingers, banged down hard. Boardrooms, bedrooms, headrooms, hidden rooms, unbidden rooms. Jabberbone and punyburg. Gyre and gimble ultraspeed. All of Mobchester, playing the gambles.
Super-zoom, it’s a bone boom!
Domino dots pulsate in bloom, the dream song, working the pop.
Tommy Tumbler, tumbling Tommy. Cookie Luck, cooking the luck. The players busy licking their bones, mooning their breath, tuning some last faulty prayers, taking a collective merger-burger, singing their hosannas to rusty pianos. Masturbating some dumb-sucking squeezer to the patent-pending gods of sex.
Squeeze to win!
As the blurbflies joined their bodies, mutating wild to fill the city with new, never-before-seen messages:
Squeeza Teeza to win! Hoviz to win! Chokanova to win! Biscuit Booms to win! Madkow Spirit to win! Napalm Zigarettes to win! Filter Breath to win! Möbius Dick Whalesteaks to win! Sticky Smellotape to win! Yummy Gum to win! Unintendo to win! Deadly Venom to win! Domino Choks to win! Enola Cola to win! Flipchart Messiah to win! Micro Jackson to win! Goon Juice to win! Long Distance Davis to win! Quirk Moths to win! Demon Bacon to win! Klueless Klan to win! Dull English Breakfast to win! Takki Donald’s to win! Chukky’s Strikken Chikken to win! Long Distance Domino to win! Artificial Facial to win! Demon Teeza Bacon to win! All-Over-in-a-Second Delay Cream to win! Dizzy Knees Theme Park to win! Napalm Yummy Whalechok to win! Salsa Mane to win! MacDizzy’s Meat Pies to win! Takki Jack’s Enola Boomtape to win! Flipchart Hoviz Chikken to win! Madkow Klueless Klan to win! All-Over-in-a-Domino Delay Biscuits to win! Stickytakk Yummyflip to win! Domikow Teezachikk Goonobooms to win!
The streets of Blurbchester were thick with the mergers, a corporate fog of brand images. People had to battle through them just to buy their latest dominoes. The Government was at a loss regarding the overwhelming messages; they knew the experiment had gone wrong, but how to right it? With the AnnoDomino Company the Government whispered, with the burgercops they pontificated, with the big Whoomphies they made a big beef; stop this plague of flies immediately, they urged, before the people stop voting for us.
No deal. This is what you get, fucking the adverts.
OK, let’s play!
‘Is it just me,’ said Jazir, ‘or are the blurbs getting louder?’
Hackle’s house, where the clock ticks towards nine. Where the Fractals gather, each with their bones in a young girl’s hands. Watch their eyes dance as Cookie Luck dances to their eyes. Jazir Malik at the computer, working the keys. Joe Crocus looking over Jazir’s shoulder, telling him how to capture it better. Jazir telling him to get the fuck out of his domain. Daisy Love sitting beside her father on the settee, actually holding her father’s hand, thinking, If only they’d all stop arguing, maybe we could get somewhere.
Max Hackle in his counting house, below ground, walking the maze of corridors, counting out his chances. Little Miss Celia sitting cross-legged in the centre of the chalk circle; the child who held all their bones to her frozen heart. Sweet Benny Fenton, standing alone, leaning against the wall where the clock ticked.
Joe, Joe, Joe! Sweet Benny’s soul was full of the name, but his mind was as empty as his chances of ever winning anything. Joe Crocus, the man he had once loved so deeply, only a few days ago, but now…
Where the fuck was that Hackle bastard? No wonder he never came to these meetings. Down in the cellar, I’ll bet, waiting for Joe to finish here.
What to do about it? How to confront it, to finish it, to win it over. How to give up, how to fight for his rightful love. How many years has this been going on?
Surely, it would all come to him.
Joe was shouting now. ‘OK, children. Here we go. Pray for a winning.’
At last, and at a long last, the stars of Cookie Luck fall into an exact nine o’clock shape. Into a bone of rare occurrence…
It was as though Manchester took a collective breath. A sudden whoosh! of fear and surprise as nine o’clock struck and Lady Cookie Luck started to change. All creamy she went, screaming as her tight black catsuit turned into twilight, her illustrious breasts flattening, her fertile hips becoming two thin curves of pure bone. One by one the stars on her body went out. Her skin started to shrivel and die, to let her skeleton poke through. Her lovely face turning to a skull’s grin. Her famous hair of ebony falling out in chunks. Until she was all jutting bones, all a rattling puppet of fibulas and tibias, scapula and humerus, kneecaps and pubis.
Life went creamy.
And Lady Luck screamed in pain one last time as the gibbering thing inside burst through her skin. What a horrorshow to put before the populace. Cookie Luck, turning herself inside out! Becoming her own skeleton.
With a blank and another blank.
A double-fucking-blank.
Dotshit!
Losing prize. The dreaded Joker Bone. Often talked about, never before seen. This was the Joker’s very first appearance in the game. Being a winner was now being a loser and vice versa. And all the Dark Fractals were just another bunch of winners, having lost; their lonely bones as lovingly clutched by the lovely Celia Hobart coming up with pips. Nobody spoke in Hackle’s house, nobody spoke in Manchester, until Jazir breathed, ‘Thank the spices!’ and the whole of Manchester echoed his cry. Their bones were all fully numbered.
As somebody somewhere…
Joe was trying to calm his players. ‘People, please…there is no need to panic. None of us has won.’
&
nbsp; But Daisy couldn’t say anything; too scared and too shaken to speak. The idea that somebody somewhere…and it could so easily have been herself, claiming the booby prize.
Jazir said it for her: ‘Some poor sucker, somewhere…just won themselves a nasty.’
‘Somebody, somewhere,’ called out Tommy Tumbler, from the city’s screens, ‘just won themselves a special prize for the double-blank. May the gods of chaos have mercy upon your loser’s soul.’
As the skull puppet laughed over a million televisions.
PLAY THE RULES
12a.
In the event of a double-blank, AnnoDomino must allow every player an equal chance to lose.
12b.
Every player but the loser shall win.
12c.
There shall be no escape.
Keen for the game taxes, but fearful of the populace becoming too addicted, the Government had specified that the nation’s dominoes must contain a rare chance of losing, and losing badly.
Hence the Joker Bone. A prize you didn’t have to collect, because the prize came looking for you. The skull beneath the skin came prowling for the winner. And the prize for a double-blank was an unknown. Some punters claimed it was financial ruin, others that you ended up in jail. Some happy souls even claimed that the booby prize was none other than death. Death by numbers, turning the winner into an all-time loser.
Of course the Government got it completely wrong: the chance of losing so badly only made the punters play to win even harder. That being the nature of the human soul.
Somebody somewhere…
DJ Dopejack was at his computer, working the AnnoDomino channel on the Burgernet. The giggling figure of the Joker was still dancing on the screen, but something else was getting to the rogue Dark Fractal, and he couldn’t quite figure it out.
What the fuck was nibbling at him? Certainly not the fact that all his bones had come up dotted. He was glad to have lost. OK, he was nursing some bad bruises courtesy of Nigel Zuze and the League of Zero. And they’d stolen his wallet and all his papers, his notes on the game, and they knew where he lived now, but that wasn’t the problem. No, but something about the way the Joker Bone was dancing on the screen. It was scary, even just watching the animation, but that wasn’t it. Something else…something to do with the movement…who would have thought it, the way a skeleton could dance…
Dopejack worked at some more keys, until he brought up the AnnoDomino menu bar. There he found his favourite icons. Ways in he had worked hard to uncover over the last week.
PUBLICITY
RESEARCH
GAME THEORY
HISTORY
RULES
STRUCTURE
Most of it was iced with trivia: PUBLICITY, for instance, produced rates for buying a blurbvert. The RESEARCH button revealed slick details about the latest products: a new strain of burger, a new kind of cop, a new breed of blurbfly, plans for the Domidome. Nothing meaty. GAME THEORY; learned papers on the rulings of chaos. Stuff for Hackle to lose himself in, not the DJ. HISTORY; a whole load of shit about the dominoes being invented back in Italy, like the eighteenth century, man. And a list of the previous winners and their chosen bones. And this week’s winner, just coming in: blank-blank. The dreaded double-blank. Hope one of the Fractals caught a packet, ha ha. Finally, RULES was just that; weighted on the bone side.
Dopejack would help himself if he only knew what was troubling him. STRUCTURE was what he wanted. He pressed on the icon, bringing up menus within menus. Dopejack was on the nail with these nested icons by now; silver surfer of the fractal cursor. Loading up with his latest strain of the game’s hackergene, he dragged a domino icon into the stack of menu, hatched it till the flies swarmed out and started eating their way through the doorways. Fat on their mother, how they buzzed! Too bad Jazir had shown him the way, the stupid bonesucker.
(And strange the way that watching the blurb icons always made him feel excited. He had a hard-on just from watching them fly around the screen.)
Down to PERSONNEL they ventured together…
MR MILLION
COOKIE LUCK
TOMMY TUMBLER
JOKER BONE
RIFFRAFF
The last was easy, at least to one level down; just a list of employees, salary details, progress reports, aptitude tests, etc. No addresses. COOKIE and TOMMY were more difficult, but still accessible with the latest strains. Nothing revealing, of course; the usual whitewash. Dopejack had tried a hundred times to open MR MILLION’s door, always with ACCESS DENIED. The same with JOKER BONE, but now that the monster had been publicly revealed, maybe…
Excellent! Blurbs, do that thing!
Dopejack got a partial opening, just enough to pluck free a menu:
GOVERNMENT RULINGS
DANCING PATTERNS
MUTATION PROCEDURES
HISTORY
Dopejack pressed on the DANCING PATTERNS. And there the Joker Bone was, dancing along his programmed pathways. Mr Bonejangle, in tune to the chaos rhythms.
Just like…just like…
Bonejuice! He split the screen, brought up a video from his own collection, fed the infoblurbs fat on it. He pressed on HISTORY in the domino channel, fed the new blurbs into it, feedback knowledge, praying for an opening…
Got one, a mere sliver that a blurb could creep through.
Dopejack worked for ten more minutes, making sure. Making sure by stripping away all the protection from the Joker, finding deep treasures. Feeding it all back in, over and over…
Finding the treasure at the centre of the maze, and straight away typing a message to Hackle’s Burgernet address.
As somebody somewhere…
Luckily, not in the House of Hackle. ‘All I can say,’ said Jazir, ‘is thank the dots Little Celia here didn’t agree to holding our bones till this morning! We’d be stuffed otherwise.’
‘Maybe,’ said Daisy.
‘That’s one maybe too many.’
‘If it’s true, I mean…your theory about holding the bones…’
‘What else can it be? It’s osmosis.’
‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Joe, trying to keep control. ‘We have to keep working. Benny…’
Benny was far away, across the room, the other side of his head, thinking only of…
‘Benny! Wake up. What’s the latest on the gene analysis?’
‘What?’
‘Good god, man! Where are you?’
‘Right here. I’ve tried to find some anomaly in Celia’s DNA that could account for her being so lucky. There’s nothing there, not that stands out. I reckon Mr Million’s having the same problem.’
‘Maybe he’s better than you?’
This remark, seemingly so Jazir, actually came from Joe. The whole room was silent. The first time any of them had heard Joe put Benny down so openly. Sure, they all knew that the two hadn’t been getting on lately. None of them knew why.
Celia knew, but she was keeping quiet.
But for Joe—Joe Crocus for crying out loud!—for Joe to place Benny below the dominoes? Unheard of.
‘That’s not fair, Joe.’ Now this was Jazir, trying to make some peace. ‘The Annos have got two specimens to compare. What’s Benny supposed to do?’
‘He’s got two as well.’ Now this was from Daisy’s father, usually so quiet at these meetings.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Jaz.
But Joe had already grabbed Daisy’s father by the hand, dragging him from the settee.
‘Hey! What’s going on?’ cried Daisy. ‘Joe! Leave him!’
‘Shut up! Meeting dismissed! You!’ Pointing at Benny. ‘My room. Now!’
A door banged shut…echoing…
‘Phew!’ Jazir breathed out. ‘What was that about?’
Daisy turned to Benny.
Benny just shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say.’ He was smiling. Why was he smiling?
Jazir turned to Daisy. ‘There’s something going on, pet. You’d best
find out.’
Daisy turned to Celia.
Celia turned to the computer. ‘What does this mean?’ she asked.
‘It’s a net message for Hackle.’ Jazir pressed a key. ‘Let’s see…’
The message came up on screen, superimposed on the Joker’s frozen grin.
‘Who’s it from?’ asked Daisy.
‘Dopejack. I think you should read it.’
Benny and Daisy and Celia and Jaz, all standing round the computer.
‘He’s bluffing,’ said Jazir. ‘Got to be.’
Somebody somewhere…
A tingling in the fist, as nine o’clock played out its final gift. Somebody somewhere, opening their trembling hand to find a monster living there, a blank-eyed monsterbone. Screams around him, from quick-departing friends.
Winning bone. Losing bone.
As DJ Dopejack wondered what on earth to do with his newly found knowledge.
As Jazir Malik made a date with Daisy for that night, her bed, her luscious body. ‘After I’ve finished serving curries, I’ll come and service you.’ Then left, seeing that Daisy didn’t have a laugh inside her.
As Daisy didn’t dare laugh.
As Joe watched Max argue with Jimmy down in the cellar.
As Benny lay shivering on his bed. His and Joe’s bed. Our bed! Something had to be done. No more waiting. He took the keys to Joe’s car.
As Celia told Daisy all about having seen Joe and Max kissing.
As blurbflies flew around the house and down the street and in and out of windows, alongside Benny’s speeding car and every other car and all the buses and trains, under the city’s skin, inside of heads and outside of television.
Play to lose! Play to lose!
