2. A Contagion (from Slaughtermatic)
A contagion of squad cars moved between the potholes of Deal Street like roaches
prowling a cheap hotel. In Beerlight this was a risk--so many were boosted the authorities had
considered replacing them with a mono rail. The reflection of code art and graffiti scrolled across
a window behind which a figure was bent in thought or indigestion. A random bullet
spiderwebbed the window, erasing the image.
It was the last car to pull up in the twilight shadow of the Deal Street Highrise. The door
opened and Chief Henry Blince bulged out like a gum bubble which refused to burst. Blince had
lost all sense of proportion--each of his chins was registered to vote. His bulk was the only thing
standing between justice and chaos, and he had so far kept these conditions innocent of one
another. Biting into a doughnut the size of a flotation ring, he surveyed the first floor bank. "How
many inside, Benny?"
"Twenty-five, Chief," sniggered Benny the Trooper.
"How many outside?"
"Four and a half million, Chief, border to border."
"And ain't it right that every one of us is essentially
bisexual?"
"That's what they say, Chief."
"So us and the folks inside'll have somethin' to talk about. Gimme the bullhorn." The
bullhorn screeched like a stuck pig as Blince aimed it at the bank. "Come out and we won't blow
the whistle on your goddamn depravities. Dogs? Cattle? Who'll ever know? And for those o' you
with Oedipal urges, mom's the word."
Blince broke off to gasp with laughter. Benny was kicking the car with constricted
mirth.
"Now why ain't they emergin', Benny?"
"It's the sirens, Chief--they know who we are."
"That so?" Blince raised the bullhorn. "Fractal eddies, you sons o' bitches. Everythin'
influences everythin' else. You're goddamn accessories and I got hard scientific
evidence."
"Non-linearity's six feet under, Chief."
"You pitchin' complexity? Hell with that--all I need's a bagel and a caffeine
drip."
"Nah, disorder theory, Chief--'Every action or inaction may or may not be related to some
other action or inaction.'"
"By any other dumb name, Benny, and just where in the wide world d'you leap off tellin'
me what's the fashion? With your pewter pants. This here's a clean-up operation, Benny. We're at
the crime face, drillin' on all cylinders. Stampin' on the many and varied serpent heads o'
subversion. Born to the job while the smoke o' creation was still
swirlin'."
Benny giggled and pranced on the spot. "I got a good feelin' about this,
Chief."
"You and me both, Benny."
"I'm beefed up."
"Me too, Benny, me too. Get a demographic cannon out here and put it on a broad
setting."
At that moment a figure emerged through the shattered entrance, shuffling and decrepit,
hands timidly raised.
"What's the point o' this joker?" asked Blince. The town and its people were found wanting
in the harsh glare of his ignorance. "Gimme your guzzler,
Benny."
Benny handed over a snub gun and Blince whirled the chamber, spitting aside like a
pitcher on a mound. Then he shuttered and raised the gun. Mr. Kraken was cut in
half like a credit card.
The Kid went over to the third floor window. "This place, man," he breathed.
"Reminds me what my pa said on his deathbed.
"What'd he say?" asked Corey.
"Nuthin', miss--he was dead. Hey Danny, there's cops and the Sun's goin'
down."
"Terrific," said Dante, peering at the ceiling. "Here I've taken responsibility for four lives
and the brotherhood wants to relieve me of the consequences." Dante emptied the Winchester
into the ceiling, threw it aside and pulled a desk across the floor. "I see Download again I'm gonna
tease a bullet into his head. Easier to pull a hat out of a rabbit than a habit out of a
rat."
Download Jones had a reputation as a practical joker. He liked to put scorpions on
people's seats and look on as these rarest of animals were crushed. Like most socketeers his
woridview was small format. He'd siphoned his brain into a mainframe which would have stupid
ideas even after his death. He was a youth excited too often by the
future.
"Download wouldn't dump us," whispered the Kid as the three climbed through the
ceiling. "Deep down he's all heart--stab him and the knife'd
germinate."
Dante had the job down to fly-leg detail. The first three floors belonged to the bank and
the bank's elevator rose no further. Above that, according to Download's sensurround
reconstruction, were seventeen floors devoted to scams of every stamp, reached by a bullet
elevator up the side of the building. Dante's little group would hitch the bullet to the roof where
Rosa Control would be waiting with a grin and a jetfoil to Alaska--the continuation of Dante's life
and reputation would be assured. He and the Kid were pioneers of the permutation heist, forcing
staff to sample small cakes or listen to dismal poetry. They stole trashbaskets, flooded vaults with
kelp sludge and staged full costume drama for nocturnal surveillance cameras. Tonight's piece was
meant to launch the more subtle and mature work for which everyone assured them they were
ready.
On the fourth floor they found a warehouse full of hydraulic dictators and other creepy
toys. The bullet ele vator didn't show but there was a regular one the broth erhood had taken out
with a crowdpleaser. "Why'd they run a tank into the elevator?" gasped
Corey.
"Didn't figure we newted the other one," said Dante. "Guess they know we're headed for
the roof."
"I hate inflatables!" Corey shrieked, kicking the face of a vinyl Hitler. "They're
historic!"
Dante was already feeling strange about the caper--about everything. Was it just the
screwup with the building? By guesswork he tried to match his disassociation to the disused
words he'd salvaged from a contraband copy of Vampire Reverse. Abandonment? Jacinth?
Shame? Nostalgia?
He seated himself against a wall and breathed deeply. For once he was glad Rosa wasn't
around--she referred to meditation as "aspirin on stilts" and approved less of the rom book he'd
boosted from the vault: The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel by Eddie
Gamete.
He visualized the waters of a pond until the last of the shark fins had submerged. A little
clearer in the head, he closed the meditation and scrolled the stolen volume, recalling the story.
Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even
the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the
largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort. He wires up a sophisticated sonic rig to
record himself blinking and relay the sound through ten stack amplifiers in the front yard, so that
the slightest flicker of an eyelid shatters windows up and down the street. He changes a lightbulb
by holding it up and letting the world revolve around him. He writes a history of
digitotalitarianism by assigning letters of the alphabet to the varied unreachable itches in his
middle ear. He officially nominates a "slight, fleeting sensation of nausea" as a senatorial
candidate. He declares a ceasefire with his reflection. Having learned to effect the world in a grain
of sand and create heaven in a wildflower, he goes into the larger world with a tortuously
amplified causal energy and finds he can switch the world image to negative and positive and back
again with the flick of a hand. Told in the first person, the entire scenario proves to be the
demented fantasy of a gameshow host who has repented and sits all day at the window wearing a
propeller hat. "A thought is no different than an act," he concludes, "especially if your thoughts
are of no consequence."
This was the last thing Gamete had written before his spectacular death. Legend had it the
book had been written not with a pen but a bellows.
Dante knew all this from snaffle and hearsay, but now was the first time he'd held the
fruit in his paws. Browsing, he saw straight off the story wasn't central--the spice seemed to be in
the speed-of-consciousness rants Barbanel scrawls on the walls and ceiling:
There was a time when the extension of illegality to
innocent acts could be used to manipulate men. But when
guilt is no longer felt over acts of genuine criminality, what
hope of instilling guilt in the innocent?
Barbanel's wallworks reminded Dante of an exercise he'd idly pursued during rehearsal--as
an installation piece the job had been organized more like a notion than an act. They'd
memorized the upper floors in case the elevator stalled, but Dante was faster than the Kid and
spent a lot of spare time creating a memory palace. Every hall and corner of the building was
used as a signifier, a means of remembering text and images by having them dotted around the
walls of the simulation. Strolling through the simulation he could read an entire story, and then,
by walking through the real thing, be able to recall it.
But this wasn't the building he'd memorized--similarities and flashes of text were triggered
here and there but in a jumbled order. He'd memorized a favorite Gamete story in which an angel
stows away in a hypoderinic needle and is inadvertently injected. The girl who receives it feels
only the faintest tingle as the being is absorbed.
In this unfamiliar place the story was scrambled so that the girl was injected into the angel,
which reacted by becoming a god. Why was the real thing different from the simulation? Had
Jones really sold them down the river?
As he sat considering these issues he heard the leper's bell of an approaching idea--rnaybe
Download never let them out of the simulation. The thought hit him like a car at a stop sign. If
they were still hooked in, the heist had been nothing but a wraparound
dream.
Virtual reality. That would explain why he felt so bored.
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Chapbook Selections From Web Del Sol