Pixel Juice

by Jeff Noon

  We were in the up-chute now, floating up past levels six and seven. Apex was copslang for the APXC coding: Approach with Extreme Caution. And there were too many unknowns in the printout, and all I could think about was ...

  'What's wrong, Muldoon? You don't want some bonus?'

  I realized that Gumball had been talking all the while. 'What?'

  'Jesus, you're out of it tonight, girl.' He snapped his gum, hard, driving with one hand to do it.

  'Just get us there, Gum. And quit the girl stuff.'

  'Sorry, ma'am. Officer Muldoon. Janet, my dearest.'

  'Will you—'

  'Oh ... I get it... it was an Apex that got Parker, right? The staircase. Doesn't mean this is the same one.'

  'I want full effect on this, Gumball. You hear me? Mask on at all times, and no go without my orders.'

  'Sure. Hey, that was bad, I hear, with Parker. Some of the guys were talking about it. You were with him, right? What happened? I mean, really.'

  'Will you shut the fuck up!'

  'Right. Touchy. Sure thing.'

  We were on Level 10 now, and turning into Lane 29, where the Dollberg unit was. Another commsvan was already pulled up outside the store, with a bunch of cops standing around, looking nervous. We pulled up hard, and when I got out, it.was Chief Inspector Brendel in the other van. Scattermasked, of course, but I could tell her from the shape; no-one that fat ever got to work the patrols, strictly desk-job. She called me over, and I did the salute, and she did the greetings, then she asked me to get in the van with her. She leaned close, till our masks were almost knocking together. 'Officer Muldoon,' she stated, 'I don't want you in there.'

  'But—'

  'It's too soon. This is a bad one. I can't afford to mess up again.'

  'It's the same one? The stairway?'

  'Never mind what it is. Officer Drane, here, will handle it.'

  Drane, a big strapped-in guy, was looking over at me, that stupid smile on his face. It was difficult to tell him apart from the still-dancing autodolls in the store window.

  'No way! This is mine. Parker, he—'

  'You're excused. Thank you, that is all.'

  'I know this rogue. Who else does? I can handle it. Drane can't handle it. He doesn't know. It does things to you. Makes you want to—'

  'Janet... please.'

  Here we go. It was always bad when Brendel called you by the first name. The switch to casual meant a dismissal in no time, unless you backed down.

  'Ma'am. Of course. Please forgive my speaking out of turn.'

  'Granted. High stress, no doubt. And too personal. You know how that messes up a job.'

  'Yes, ma'am.' I was speaking from a distance, as Drane and his team prepared to enter the Dollberg store.

  'Never get too close, Muldoon. And this is woman to woman, OK? Colleagues are not for loving. You understand? I'm sure you do.'

  'Right.'

  I walked back to the van, where Gumball was loading up. 'We're off this one, Gum,' I said to him.

  'Off it! Shit, it's our call. Apex call.'

  'Let's go check out Beenie's for the infected flots.'

  'You do that. I'm staying.'

  'You stay, Gumball... it's your last job.'

  'Ma'am.'

  We climbed back in the van. Gumball drove on empty for a while, but I stopped him around the first bend. 'OK, we watch from here.'

  'We do? What is this?' He was raising his mask.

  'No. Keep it on.'

  I had a bad feeling, you see, and I knew Brendel was at a loss on this one. And when we walked round the corner, I could already hear the cries and the screams from the store, and see the chaos that the commcops were thrown into. Brendel was struggling to get out of her van, and even from the end of the lane, the look on her face, the fear...

  'Jesus! What the—'

  It was Gumball's voice, and I swear he actually took the gum out of his mouth to say it. But what could I do? He was all set to run, to give help, but I called him back. I wanted to tell him how bad it would be, and how hopeless and if only people listened to me, once in a while, wouldn't life be better, easier, more long-lasting. But the mood of before, the distance from the world had come upon me again, folding like a stranger's shadow.

  Later, I went with Gumball to visit Beenie's Fishorama. I guess we were, the both of us, hiding our despair behind the workload. First of all we rounded up Mr Beenie himself, told him the usual about transmitting illegal adverts, confiscated his broadcaster, slapped another fine on him, his seventh in that year alone. Then we found the flotboy from before, which was easy; him and his friends were tucking into plate after plate of spicy prawns. I gave him the spoiler shot, which he had to receive by law, and of course, a few seconds after the stuff had entered his veins, he threw up violently. The jetgirl was there as well, the one who had been fixed upon my spoiler gun. This was strange, because flots and jets kept well apart usually, and anyway, she wasn't eating, not having seen the prawn advert up front. Again, she was all eyes on me, on the uniform, the upraised scattermask, the gun, especially the gun.

  Meanwhile, Gumball had succumbed to a plate or two of prawns himself. 'I must have got a glimpse,' he said. 'Never mind, eh? I'm hungry anyway.'

  'No, you're not, Gum,' I answered. 'I told you, mask on, all times.'

  I didn't eat, myself, still too strung out from the Dollberg incident. But we sat together, and I watched Gumball tackle his meal. His chewing gum was stuck on the table beside him, for later use. It was a sickly green this time, the colour of a bad moon. And between every mouthful, my new partner was full of spittle and talk.

  'What about Drane, eh ? Thank Christ we didn't go in. Hey, I should thank you for that. Jesus! What'll happen to him, Drane I mean? The same as Parker?'

  I shrugged, keeping the mood cool. Really, I just wanted to finish this shift, get some sleep.

  'You were close to him, weren't you? Parker, I mean. So the boys tell me. I mean, you had a thing going on, right?'

  'Wrong.'

  'Wrong? But I thought—'

  'Look, Gum. Shut up, will you. Eat the prawns.'

  'Sure I will. Nice prawns, these. What happened?'

  'What?'

  'You know, with you and Parker, and this... what is it? This staircase advert thing. I mean, what's so fucking bad about it?'

  'You've read the reports.'

  'Official-line bollocks? Never touch 'em. I want the truth, Muldoon. I mean, don't I deserve it? Nobody wanted to take Parker's place, you know? You're down as a bad deal.'

  'You think I care?'

  'Do I fuck think you care. Ain't that why I like you?'

  I didn't tell him everything, of course. I left out the worst part. But I kept it truthful, and I kept it cool and neat, because telling it like that, like a story that had happened to somebody else, well it brought a calmness to me. It started, as most of our jobs do, after the beginning. It's double-bonus time if we catch an advert before it's affected anybody, especially the killer thralls. Usually, we're too late to save the first victims. We're just the cleaners, really; we go in after a bad show, we make it safe again for the taxpayers. Apex jobs are a recent trend, and the Stairway trans was my first. Parker's last.

  He was only a kid really, Parker, and I should've looked after him better. He'd been my partner for about two months when the trouble started. I knew all about the locker-room gossip, of course. There's still only a few of us women in charge of teams, and Brendel's decision to set me up with a kid ten years younger than me, well ... let them talk. But we had a thing, you know, a way of working together that was good. Parker respected me; it wasn't the constant battle of wits, like with Gumball and all the rest. I really should've looked after him.

  We first got word of the trouble when a too-high proportion of people started killing themselves. Lobjobs, mostly, and usually off the top of prominent buildings. It was a public display, a grand exit. It was fairly obvious that an advert was to blame, but tracking it down to sour
ce was proving difficult. The adverts they've got these days, it's not just buying the latest gizmo; they can make you do anything. That's why we have the strict controls; that's why we're here, the commcops. Someone should've realized that bad people would get hold of the technology, because don't they always? So, we'd had killer transmissions before, but never this successful, and never this prominent. It was the number one job on the crime sheets, and we were getting nowhere on it, until a victim came forward.

  This guy was in a right state, babbling mainly, and screaming about a stairway, 'a golden stairway, endlessly . . . endlessly ...' Eventually, we got some sense out of him. He'd been sitting at home, quite peacefully, watching a game show on television. His wife was with him. The children, thankfully, were upstairs at the time. They missed the advert. The advert that came out of nowhere, just sitting in between all the other adverts that plagued the TV that night, and nothing strange about it, just this image of an endlessly rising stairway. No words with it, no slogan, but that was the norm. The usual freeze. The freeze and the thrall. Legal ads were low-level interference, and you could easily resist their temptations with a little will-power. So they'd thought nothing of it, this man and woman, except they both dreamed that night of the stairway, and of going up it, and what they might find there.

  The next day, two in the afternoon, the wife had thrown herself out of the top-storey window of the office where she worked. That was five days ago, and distraught as he was, and full of suffering for his lost wife, how could the husband not want to join her? This is when he read about the spate of similar suicides. God knows what resources he had conjured up to get himself as far as the commcop station.

  Brendel wanted to place him under arrest, for his own safety, but the authorities would have none of that. So we filled him up with the maximum dose of spoiler juice, and then let him go. He lasted two days. Of course, we had a cop on his tail the whole time. Did no good; he shook the cop off, just for a minute.

  A minute's a long time when you're falling...

  Things got bad then, because the story broke loose. The media were hounding us, and Brendel was on a sharp edge. She cancelled all leave, tripled the bonus for the Apex score, got the lab boys working full-time on the transmission source. The only good thing they could find was how the stairway ad would only ever appear on one receiver at a time. What we call a narrowcast. It would turn up on a private TV, a computer screen, an arcade game. Never on a public system, like a cinema screen. As though the advert was picking people off, one by one. Sniper mentality. We tried putting out our own adverts, warning people not to watch, or play, or in any way to have serious leisure time. We did the usual pointless appeal to the TV and game companies, asking them to suspend all transmissions. Like, yeah, sure we'll cut off our money supply, just on some unsubstantiated claim about a killer ad. Get out of here. So we distributed free scatterglasses, cheap and nasty ones, which is a bit like getting flotsams to wear pinstripe suits. No deal, and you can't reach everybody, not all the time, so I guess we all got to feel like warriors, us commcops, naked on the streets against this invisible, deadly enemy. How else explain what Parker did, what I let him do?

  It was a Sunday night, quiet time in the all-night arcades. The usual flots and jets to unfreeze, no big deal. Parker was getting bored, and itchy. He was expecting more of the job, of course he was, young like that; I was the same. Pretty soon you get to find out that being a commcop isn't quite like the recruiting images, and I tried to give him the real package. Stupid kid wouldn't listen, going crazy he was, with fighting talk about how he was gonna take this stairway fucker out, once and for all. He was hot for it, and I couldn't help but get a secret pleasure, remembering mainly, remembering how it had been when I first started out.

  We found a group of flots gazing full on at a game screen. Locked solid they were, and as we came up, I was dreading seeing the stairway there. This had been my fear, the last few weeks: coming across a spectator in thrall to the killer. Luckily, it was just a slowly rotating pair of plastic trainers up there on the display, saying in secret, 'Buy me! Buy me! Buy me now, you stupid suckers!' Easy game, because this had all the design flair of a camel's arse, and was obviously a trans from Minskey's Muscle, a sports shop only two blocks away. Parker was mad keen to shoot the trainers himself, he had the gun out and loaded and everything, so I said, 'This one's yours, kid', and went off to slap the fine on Minskey.

  Big mistake. Because it took longer than I thought, what with Minskey putting on a show, and his pumped-up sales assistants hanging round in sub-pensive mode. All around me were banks of screens playing out the same commercial, and variants thereof, and here this guy was, claiming he 'didn't never have such bad adverts, no ma'am, not never. See now, these good adverts, clean adverts, no nasties. No freeze. See?'

  All the time I was hoping Parker would hurry up. I needed the back-up. What was the kid doing? Surely he'd done the deed by now, come on. In the end I had to walk out of there empty-handed, which pissed me off. So I was all set to give the grief to my so-called partner. I was acting mad for my own failure, I know, and maybe the kid was having trouble, it's just that I can't stand not making a clean case of a job. And by the time I get back to the arcade, the place is deserted, all the games standing empty, forlorn with abandoned play. No flots, no jets, no Parker. So I'm looking round and getting worried, when I hear this noise from the next aisle, a kind of screaming sound. Like human, through the mincer. Straight off, I should've called for back-up. Instead I was just running over there, towards the bad sound, because the sound got me in the guts. Bad reaction getting to me. Round the corner, I see a bunch of people going crazy outside this one shop. The screaming coming from them. OK, get up close, and slow down, slow down, check the situ, play the book. The shop was a dark-eye, shut for business. Abandoned, read the slashed-on sign across the window. The door thinly open. OK, what's the score here?

  'My sister! My sister! Help her! My sister!'

  One freaked-up flotboy, coming right on at me, making me sweat, so desperate. And someone else, saying, 'It's the stairway thing, pretty sure it must be.'

  'She's in there?' I ask.

  'Get her out!' screams the boy. Keeps on screaming.

  'Where's my colleague?'

  'Uh?' Voices.

  The other cop, where is he?'

  'He went in.' Voices all round.

  Shit.

  I look around the crowd, most of them quiet now and just looking at me, as though I could save one of their kind, but all I was thinking about was Parker, that stupid fucker, going in alone. I think that's when I got round to calling HQ for the back-up van, Apex coding. Of course, I didn't wait, how could I? Instead, pull the mask down tight, load the spoiler, kick the door wide, step through.

  Dark. Dark in there. Only the faint buzz of colour through the scatter, vapour from some screen, way back. No sign of Parker or the girl, and what the fuck was a television doing on, in this dump? Moving through, beam on, I see signs of cheap habitation, spread duvets, camping stoves, pots and pans. Flot squat. In the dark my beam flashes on something, a rolled-up duvet or something, then I see it's a kid, a young girl. She's lying on the ground, all cradled up in herself, gently rolling, back and forth, back and forth. And when I bend down, turn her over, and she opens her arms for me, I see this amazing thing — she's got a mask on. A commcop mask.

  'Jesus, I didn't know that,' said Gumball. 'You mean ...'

  'Yeah. Parker took his mask off, gave it to the girl. He saved her life.'

  'Jeez!' He'd finished his prawns by now, and the gum was back in his mouth, and he was chewing on it, but slowly. 'That's fucking brave!'

  'It's stupid. But yeah, brave, I suppose. I found him there, stuck fast in front of the television. He had the gun out and everything, and he was pointing it at the screen, and I swear he was trying to shoot, even with the thrall on him. He had tears ... tears on his cheeks, frozen. That's when I heard the backup sirens. Too fucking late, course they were.'r />
  'Hey, don't blame yourself, Muldoon.'

  'Why not? You got someone else handy?'

  'So ...' And here he stretched the gum out of his mouth in a long line — a dirty yellow this time — and then let it snap back. 'So what did it look like?'

  'The advert? Well, I had the mask on, so I was only getting the filter. Just some stairs, nothing special. Animated, so that they kept rising upwards, and never ending. Looked kinda cheap, really. You know, amateurish.'

  'That's it?'

  'That's it.'

  'Jeez!'

  'Yeah. Let's clock off.'

  But when I started to get the gear together, I saw this kid looking at me from the next table along, listening distance. It was the jetgirl, the one with the hard shopping eyes, and away from her flottish friends now. She was smiling at me.

  'What's up with you?' I asked her.

  'Nothing much, just listening.'

  'This is cop business," said Gumball. 'Get the hell out of here. Bloody flots!'

  'I'm not a flot. I'm a jet. How dare you?'

  'All the bloody same. Nothing better to do than play stupid games all night long.'

  'They're not games. It's an art form.'

  'Yeah, right.'

  'I'm good at them. I get to cheat, you see. It's a secret, cause the cheating's built into the art. You have to discover it, then you progress. The next level.'

  Gumball stood up. His mouth worked at the gum like a machine, a rainbow machine. 'I'll progress you!' he snarled, and when he spoke, you could see all the colours inside, caught in the change.

  'Sit down, Gum,' I said to him. 'Just a kid, that's all.'

  'You're not telling him everything, are you?'

  She'd said this directly at me, with a look in her eye, a knowing look.

  'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'Tell him about the mask.'

  'What is this ?' asked Gumball.

  I ignored him, kept my eyes on the girl. She looked so young, nine or ten, although you can never tell for sure, not once they're on the street. 'What do you know?'