by Carl Neville
Squats in the kitchen, door ajar, assembles it with one eye on the tracking plet. Then he goes into the living room, empty except for a bed on the floor and a table with a glass of water on it and a cracked paperback. He’s drawn to pick it up for some reason, cover looks vaguely familiar. Resolution Way. Name of the author, has he heard that somewhere before?
Whatever. Don’t get distracted. Attaches a motion detector sensor to the door handle. Three-second delay after it’s tripped, make sure they get in the room, the bomb goes off. Ideally, he’d have a camera in there and the bomb well-hidden, make sure they were both in the flat, but the tech won’t support that and if it’s a choice between getting one of them or neither he’ll go for one. Even if he doesn’t kill them but just fucks them up enough to put them out of operation. Fine. He can’t help himself, pops a Dev, crunches it up.
He wants a drink. Deserves one. Say what you like about the PRB but it has great beer. Free beer. Big Rock Candy Mountain. The adrenaline has got him even hornier. Yeah, he will go out and celebrate tonight and if he gets told “maybe later” one more time he will lose it. He uses the ROD to find an empty flat as he jogs back along the landing, goes in and jerks off in the sink, then unable to control himself smashes up the bathroom, ripping the sink off the wall, kicking the cistern till it cracks. Still not got it out of his system, goes into the living room and stamps on the bed there till it breaks in the middle, throws the bedding across the room.
Fuck. Feels better. Maybe he’s overdoing the Dev.
Down on the street he crosses the road and goes and stands by some urban allotment bullshit spilling out into the road, series of grow boxes, the car park of an old public house being reclaimed for food production. Fucking Cubanos and Bolivianos everywhere with their fucking pious bearded Pachamama bullshit like a global fucking plague. He swipes at a plant frond poking out over the pavement then flips and starts impotently slashing at the tops of some spring onions with the back of his hand before pulling down a trellis and some pipes that are dripping water into the raised bed. Fucking organoponicos.
Calm down! Calm the fuck down.
Got some kind of downer? he asks a young guy in a regulation work outfit sitting on the edge of a concrete grow box a few feet down watching him flip out. Anything to take the edge off the Dev?
Looks like you need something. The young guy says with a smile, horrible gum to grey, stubby tooth ratio, rat-like face, sixteenth-century peasant haircut, no doubt this guy still has no problems getting laid. Fishes a little wallet out of his pocket and opens it up, a mini pill bar in there, offers him several blue chalky looking spheres.
That should calibrate it, he says.
Fucking calibrate. What century is this? OK thanks for that, he says, swallows them.
You’re American, the guy says.
That’s right. Journalist, he says. Over to report on the Games.
The kid tries to engage him in small talk and it would be fair to say he is not exactly in the mood. Still, the pills seem to have brought his pulse rate down and look here along comes Julien, perfect timing, moving very differently, more confident, in control. Sure, they have played him.
Franklin takes a few steps back and to the left, into the belled shade of an overhanging pussy willow, sees Julien go in through the door of the block. Umbral, dappled suspension of the moment, breath held watches him go along the third floor to the door and push it open.
Franklin swivels away as the device goes off, a sudden yellow spit and flare, the smoke billows then hangs, the echoing boom of the blast and the sound of concrete chips spraying out across the road below, hitting the building opposite. Swivels back and even through the expanding dust cloud he can see Julien disappearing through the doors at the end of the landing. The fuck? How has he missed him with that? How can the bomb have gone off and he isn’t in a series of wet chunks all over the street? Then he realises, shit yeah, he’s taken one of the guns, must have pushed open the door, seen a gun missing and been alerted somehow. Idiot. Still, he has the gun. So still got a chance to put it right. The young guy is up and wandering open mouthed across to the square along with some other bystanders, leaving the bike he’s using propped against the wall. Franklin takes it, puts his ROD in the holder on the front, sets off in pursuit, weaving through the citizens drifting sheeplike toward the blast site.
The blocks are arranged around a central square with some rows of lower-level flats and housing in the middle. Julien is already out the back of his block and heading across the plaza, moves fast for a man of his age and bulk. Franklin knows he needs to get up high, eagle eye, pick him off with the rifle and disappear. He hunches over the handlebars and cycles around the perimeter, then turns left and hits the entrance to the big block at the far end. Sweat bursts up his back in an arrowhead, deep breath, legs pumping, third floor, chest starting to burn, fourth floor, fifth, yells, bounces off the wall, hits the last flight, curses under his breath, motherfucker, motherfucker, up onto the balcony, gun coming out of his bag, steadying himself, through the sights, where is he? Oh yeah, bang in the middle of the square, couldn’t have made himself an easier target. Bozo. There’s someone else in pursuit, what looks like a police dog one hundred metres behind him, a girl, whoever the fuck that is, just coming into the main square through the archway at the opposite end. She’s fast.
The sights lock on and he feels a combination of pity and a terrible and elated spiralling horror, he has only done this in a simulation before. He was trained not to let the moment stretch out, not ask what is this, who am I? Just take the shot, the kill shot, immediately when the moment’s there. He anticipates a miss, needs to find out how the bullet moves, realign. A kill shot if he’s lucky, more like a test shot. Julien floats in the middle of the sights, all that effort, sweat, grimacing, going nowhere, treading water in a dead sea. Pulls the trigger. The bullet clips past him an inch or so to the left, ricochets up off the floor, takes out the dog, goes head over heels writhing, dies.
Did he miss intentionally? Just can’t do it to a live flesh-and-blood target, not the same as rolling around in VR combat-scapes at the Bleekhour Academy? Shit. What would his old man say about that?
Julien looks back, stops for a moment, sees the animal on its side, tongue lolling, blood from its flank and nose, then he looks up, questioningly, thinking someone has taken the dog out on his behalf. The girl has swerved off to the left now and is heading for cover. Franklin thinks maybe he should take her out too, play cat and mouse with dumb-fuck Julien a little longer. No, focus on the target. Adjusts his aim for the swerve to the left and a bullet silently eats into the concrete slab he’s resting the barrel on an inch or so from his hand, chips and dust into his face, instinctively he’s down, calculating the angle of the shot that has returned fire. Fuck did that come from?
Another bullet clips the top of the balcony, swerves downward and embeds itself in the bottom of the wall opposite, keeping him pinned down. An impossible shot. They understand how to use the Tomahawk’s smart features.
A smart bullet eats into the floor now, curving around, trying to find the right angle. Fuck, he flattens himself against the brick balcony, side on as another comes in at an almost ninety-degree angle, grazes his chest. Puts a crater in the floor and concrete grit in his eyes and mouth. Next shot’s going to get him unless he moves. He rolls across the floor, can almost see another incoming shot jerk and flex in the space across the square as he goes through the heavy fire door, hears the impact as it takes a massive chunk out of it. Too fucking close, he isn’t trained for this, these guys are equipped with best tech there is.
Back down the stairs, whole flight in a single jump, bullet through the gap in the door almost snagging him as he hits the floor, rolls and jumps down another flight. One hand on the handrail one on the wall, swings himself out and drops. So much easier down than up, a shoulder charge and he comes careening out through a side door to the block and Julien is literally three, four meters away heading towards him an
d incapable of checking his pace even as recognition flashes in his eyes. Franklin gets the bread knife out of his rucksack pocket, lunges at him as he swerves past, nicks him in the side of the leg, stumbles forward as Julien, oblivious to the pain for the moment, surges on. Franklin goes down onto his hands and knees then pushes himself back into a crouch, gets the rifle round from his back and into firing position, ready to put a shot in the back of his head from twenty feet away. Pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. Pulls again. Click.
Empty.
One fucking bullet? Fucking country! But it doesn’t matter anyway as Julien, bleeding more heavily than he thought, he must have got him good, slows, wobbles, seems unable to control his direction and goes down face first into some heaped black bags in one of the block’s garbage collection points, flips over on his back, convulses for a second, then lies still.
You’ve killed a man.
A noiseless blur of colour in his peripheral vision and bang! the girl he forgot all about has kicked him in the side of the face with tremendous force, his head whiplashes round and it’s only the fact that he is half crouched that stops the kick from knocking him out. Who the fuck is this?
He puts his hands up. Whoa, he says. Hold on. You PRB security? We need to talk.
Tereza
Lewis and Katja will no doubt be the heroes of the department while she is sitting here filling out daily updates and action reports and now, she clicks open the message from the health department, she has to take responsibility for the suspect that they have brought in, Pre-Questioning, what is that? Ad hoc attempt to cover his supervision, or rather lack of it, while Barrow is on mandatory rest and Squires tries to sober up enough to get his words out straight, make his way back from whatever bar he’s currently plotting in?
She clicks open the three documents attached to the electronic message, sees he has already been restrained but needs to be patched and only she has a high enough departmental rating to sign herself off to do it, as most of the staff are out at the Games or coming through to the site of the explosion in the south, or involved in questioning the detainees from Barrow’s, well, intervention, at the stadium. She takes a certain pleasure in Barrow having messed up, that mitigates in some way against the others’ success.
Is that wrong of her? Still, at least her suspect is being held in the building, the other detainees have been moved to some floating interrogation centre moored on the river that she wasn’t even aware existed until a few minutes ago, perhaps that is an ad hoc development too.
The building feels empty, even in the state of emergency they seem to have entered somehow no one is around. All at the Games or out watching it in the viewing rooms and outdoor screens. There is a television on in the corner of one of the offices and she pauses as she passes, it’s tuned to one of the American networks and they are making a big deal of the arrest at the sound booth, repeated shots of security dragging the citizens out, the UAVs suspended in the air, shots of confused faces in the crowd, then an interview with an expert on the PRB, probably a defector of some kind, sound down, subtitles.
… exact purpose of the disruption unknown at this stage we know there have been lots of groups unhappy with the Games even taking place so many different factions really here in the…
She goes into the room at the back of the office and breaks a patch out of its bubble wrap, plugs it in to one of the Passocons to check it’s working.
part of a protest against the delay in implementing the recent vote to crack open all the files the security services keep on the population among other things that
Typical misrepresentation of the situation. Her ROD beeps that Squires is in the building and will be down to join them once the patch has confirmed that the suspect can be questioned.
Too much to do and as usual she is the one who has to take charge of it all. An “action needed” alert has been sent to her for the suspect PRB 2003701 too but this is not her responsibility. The suspect’s pastoral and welfare concerns are Katja’s business and if she is too busy to deal with it she has no idea why it should devolve to her. It was already sent a few hours ago and no response from Katja, whose ROD is set on Amber, meaning she is off enjoying herself somewhere, probably with Lewis. She feels satisfied at the prospect that Katja will be seen not to take her position as seriously as Tereza does.
That’s wrong of her, surely? Well…
She goes down to Room 32, glances at the screen outside the door, there he is, nondescript man in his late thirties, looks quite short, sitting cuffed in the chair. The readout says he is showing the presence of massive quantities of Deveretol and a number of other stimulants. Side effects: manic thinking, grandiosity, logorrhoea, temporal dissociation, excessive serotonin and testosterone production, priapism. Priapism? She smirks at her own reflection in the screen. Side effect of the pharms or just a generalized condition of being an American?
Rubs her eyes, what time is it? She takes a deep breath, hopes he isn’t going to be difficult.
Lewis
The American wouldn’t stop talking even as they put him in the back of the rapid response vehicle, eyes bulging, face flushed, veins in his neck standing out, something serpent-like and writhing about him. Is this the Medusa? she wonders. Is this where her premonition has come from?
She sits in the back of an ambulance with D7 as it goes to the central kennel and uselessly holds her paw, lolling off the edge of the gurney. She finds she is blinking repeatedly, the patch the crew have strapped on her should help to blunt the loss, kill the pain in her ankle, but she can feel the mute horror of something being torn open, the painless first few seconds when the knife goes in and there is only a suspended moment in which something is wrong but the body and mind have not yet caught up to it.
They put D7 into a large silver compartment and slide it into the wall, she sits for a while in the cool and the dim light, probes at the gap, the absence within her mind in a way she remembers probing the space left behind by a lost tooth when she was a child. A strand in the web of things has snapped.
Feels a hand on her shoulder, Katja, so involved in the tentative exploration of this loss she hasn’t noticed her coming in.
Katja smiles at her.
Come with me? she asks.
Katja
She is on mandatory rest period and she shouldn’t really, who knows what the patch will say, but the last few days have been stressful, and she anticipates more stress to come. She is sure that Lewis will appreciate something, a little pick-me-up. She has had her eye on a particular pill bar near to the Enthusiasm, almost overlooking it now it has grown, that one of her colleagues at the Vashtov recommended, a micro-pharmacy up on the roof, their house special a neo-synesthetic, particularly powerful but retaining high functionality. She trusts Wojeck to know the best pharms, one look at him told you that he had devoted his life to investigating them: how do you think I got so great at envisioning maps without learning how to navigate a few pharma-scapes?
As they sit down among some potted plants, a variety of ferns and creepers growing up, hanging from a number of smooth concrete cubes stacked seemingly haphazardly in a little bower off in one corner of the roof, she checks on the menu: a scratchcard, strange name, that’s the one. She looks at the description underneath, bright, sharp, shallow: stimulus responsive, mid-high materialism: abreaction level low, mysticism high: visual: high linguistic/auditory impact low, reverie scale 2-3/low. Ideal for: enhanced group sociality, shared extrospection, cognitive reset. Sensory base note: umami with hint of fuchsia.
One of the workers circles around to the table, two scratchcards, she says and holds up her ROD to have the credits deducted. What do you recommend with them?
The scratches? Best with just water, she says.
Tereza
I have to patch you up, she says. If you try to escape or if there are any problems, the patch will put you to sleep.
Franklin raises an eyebrow.
No, literally to sleep, not kill you.
You gotta wonder, I mean I have been called pet, here, right? So you never know. You won’t be required to, y’know, physically restrain me? Don’t want to offer me any incentives to get a little feisty. I see. Let me be 100 percent full disclosure here, I have a high libido problem. Technically, I am a horn-dog, a poonhound, one of those guys who finds it very hard not to hit on any woman he meets. A compulsion. You got a pill to neutralize that? He laughs.
Tereza is a little taken aback. Actually, we have.
I don’t want it.
You have intermittent priapism, you have had an adverse reaction to the drug, your body is generating vastly more testosterone than it should be for a man of your age, she explains. That’s why you keep suffering erections.
Baby I ain’t suffering.
She brings out a patch from her bag and holds down the ON button until it beeps green, can feel the suspect’s eyes on her.
You got a whole kind of Won Ton thing going on there that’s getting my juices flowing.
Wanton?
Sour but hot. He waits for the smile.
What does that mean? Just ignore him. Well I am going to fit this patch onto you, that should start to expel some of the stimulants from your system.
Baby you better expel yourself from the room if you want me to be less stimulated.
Can’t you control this? This is rather irritating.
Why are you English so set on control, control…?
I am not English, anyway. If you want to talk in national terms, I am Welsh.
You got a little Latina blood in you, huh.
Zero.
They all built like you out in this Wales place? Maybe I need to take myself out there for a look around.
I am going to turn this up to maximum; you may feel a little lightheaded.