4. In His Tender Years (from Slaughtermatic)
In his tender years, Eddie Gamete wrote a mindmauler
on "The Difficulty of Locomotion on the Upper Lattice
Face of a Proton Pulse Bridge." The difficulty alluded to
was the fact that Proton Pulse Bridges were a figment of
Gamete's imagination and anyone attempting to loco-
mote on one would surely die. "And I'll certainly laugh,"
he concluded.
As he strode across the non-existent landscape, Blince's
reasoning was impregnable. No civilian would have been
fooled. The brotherhood, however, was trained to disregard detail. If anything, Blince felt
more secure than ever in the mutable blur of the unreal.
Benny, however; was undergoing squirly Symptoms
from three hours' circumstance abuse. There were two
ideas tilting at each other across the blank, blizzarding
wastes of his psyche. The first was that the gunshot limp
he'd endured for eight years had disappeared as though
he were placing no real pressure on the leg. The second
was that Blince was a bullnecked idiot for deeming to
leave a geek basement a few hours back without arresting
the geek. The VR enhancer drugs Download had hit
them with as soon as they entered the basement were
neither here nor there. Ironically, Benny's mind was
more lucid now than it had ever been, but the clarity was
as fleeting for him as for any new inmate or cop recruit.
Confronting the lie was so painful he had to believe it to
ease the strain.
"Do the Germans have a word for blitzkrieg, Benny?
It's been naggin' me since we left the cop den."
"We're on itchy ground here, Chief" squeaked Benny
uncertainly.
"Do my shell-like ears deceive me, Benny? Skittish at a
brace o' cadavers? I'll have you know better than I do--"
and he gestured to the bodies around the bank entrance,
"these folks are in a better place."
"Some of 'em are maybe burnin' in hell, Chief."
"What did I just say."
The sky flickered.
"And why are you so goddamn edgy?" added Blince as
they hit the edit. The evidence of their senses fitzed and
sputtered, shorting into a vertigo vortex of TV static.
The two cops were almost at the point of thinking for
themselves when the scene cut in again--they were back
on solid illusion.
The bank stood before them, undamaged and empty
of corpses. Any modifications had been voided by the
restart. In place of the smoked bulletproof glass of the
Highrise was the cheap whiteness of styrofoam. There
was no cop backup in the street behind them and the
street was unblemished by name or crater.
There was a longterm kickback to the Mall's 24-hour
loop. The theory was that the lack of any lasting consequence would maintain the dull ache
of disempowerment
familiar from the outer world, but here the absence of effect
was so immediate even slabheads perceived it and felt
a sense of carefree surrender at no longer having to delude
themselves on the issue. The instant the new day kicked in
Blince received a deafening volley of laughter in his right
ear he and Benny were surrounded by some of the most
savage louts to have slid whooping down the bell curve.
The bastards in question took unblushing advantage of
Blince's surprise and Benny's distress. Unrelieved years of
polychrome abjection turned to hard fury and hit the cops
like a diamond anvil. Splinters of panic broke out of the
sky.
Blince registered the situation with a flummer of his
pixilated jowls and, in a sluggish attempt to pull in the
reins, began shooting people for all he was worth. Every
gunflash was like a fluorescence bomb and knocked the
target to crimson pieces. The broad sweep of his firearm
took in bomb zombies, pandemonials and others who
had deemed morality a woefully inadequate protection
against the modern world. Better guttural cries and stab-
bing daggers than a shapeless apprehension, thought
Blince. "But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas
we hold," he bellowed aside.
Benny heard nothing above his own screams and fired
his snub gun with less and less discretion, unreality muffling the reverb. A gridgirl with what
appeared to be a sawed-off belly gun put a salvo in his direction and exploded like a doll stuffed
with meat. The street ran with berserkers and sim flames of rubine red. He was
dazzled by strobe light.
Blince caught a glimpse of Benny being bundled into a
cartoon car which roared off, flattening rioters. The bodies were as viscous as a Dali watch,
sticking like gum to
Blince's boots. Running, he thought about bugs and their
external skeleton. Charmless but happy. People meanwhile buried their bones as deep inside
as was physically
possible. What were the creeps trying to hide?
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