But that had happened back in Kunming. This was Bangkok, Bangkok at dusk – this was Hua Lamphong, greatest of train stations, where the great slugs breathed steam and were rubbed and scrubbed by the slug-boys whose job it was to nurture them before departure. And the Old Man wasn’t exactly an old man, either . . .
Scanning, waiting for the Old Man to arrive: Yankee tourists with in-built cams flashing as they posed beside the great beasts, these neo-nagas of reconstituted DNA, primitive nervous system and prodigious appe-tite. Scanning: a group of Martian-Chinese from Tong Yun City walking cautiously – unused to the heavier gravity of this home/planet. Scanning: three Malay businessmen – Earth-Belt Corp. standardized reinforced skeletons – they moved gracefully, like dancers – wired through and through, hooked up twenty-four Earth-hours an Earth-day, seven Earth-days a week to the money-form engines, the great pulsating web of commerce and data, that singing, Sol-system-wide, Von Neumann-machine expanded network of networks of networks . . .
Wired with hidden weaponry, too: she made a note of that.
An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly-balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Viet nam ese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it up a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers – he with long thinning silver hair and a compressed-data cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries – baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red –
An assassin could be anyone. A Yankee rich-kid on a retro-trip across Asia, reading Air America or Neuromancer in a genuine reproduction 1984 POD-paperback; it could be the courteous policeman helping a pretty young Lao girl with her luggage; it could be the girl herself – an Issan farmer’s-daughter exported to Bangkok in a century-long tradition, body augmented with vibratory vaginal inserts, perfect audio/visual-to-export, always-on record, a carefully tended Louis Wu habit and an as-carefully tended retirement plan – make enough money, get back home to Issan wan bigfala mama, open up a bar/hotel/bookshop and spend your days on the Mekong, waxing lyrical about the good old days, listening to Thai pop and K-pop and Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa, growing misty-eyed nostalgic . . .
Could be anyone. She waited for the Old Man to arrive. The trains in Hua Lampong never left on time.
Her name before, or after, doesn’t matter. They used to call her Mulan Rouge, which was a silly name, but the farangs loved it. Mulan Rouge, when she was still working Soi Cowboy, on the stage, on her knees or hands-and-knees, but seldom on her back – earning the money for the operation that would rescue her from that boy’s body and make her what she truly was, which was katoi.
They call it the third sex, in Thailand. But she always considered herself, simply, a woman.
She ran a perimeter check. Up-front, she was awed as always by the slug. It was tied up to the front of the train, a beast fifty meters long and thirty-wide. It glistened and farted as the slug-boys murmured soothing words to it and rubbed its flesh, thirty of forty of them swarming like flies over the corpulent flesh of the slug. She checked out the driver – the woman was short, dark-skinned – a highlander from Laos, maybe. The driver sat in her harness high above the beast, her helmet entirely covering her head – the only thing she wore. Pipes came out of her flesh and into the slug’s. They were one – her mind driving the beast forward, a peaceful run, the Bangkok to Nong Khai night ride, and she was the night rider. She was the train.
There were stories about joined minds like this in the Up There. Up There, beyond the atmosphere, where the world truly began. Where the Exodus ships lumbered slowly out of the solar system, in search of better futures far away. They said there were ships driven by minds, human/Other interfaces, holding sleepers inside them like wombs. They told stories of ships who had gone mad, of sleepers destined never to awake, slow silent ships drifting forever in galactic space . . . or worse, ships where the sleepers were awakened, where the ship-mind became a dark god, demanding worship . . . Mulan didn’t know who they were, or how they knew. these were stories, and stories were a currency in and of itself. Darwin’s Choice used to tell her stories . . .
She met him/her flesh-riding an older katoi body, at a club on Soi Cowboy. Darwin’s Choice – not the most imaginative name (he told her, laughing) – but he liked it. He had watched her dance and, later, signalled for her to join him.
She thought of him as a he, though Others had no sex, and most had little interest in flesh-riding. He had evolved in the Breeding Grounds, post-Cohen, billions of generations after that first evolutionary cycle in Jerusalem, and she only thought of him as him because the bodies he surfed always had a penis. He used to hold the penis in his hand and marvel at it. He always chose pre-op bodies, with breasts but no female genitalia. He always dressed as a woman. The operation was expensive, and a lot of katoi worked it off in stages. Taking on a passenger helped pay the bills – it wasn’t just a matter of cutting off cock-and-balls and refashioning sex, there was the matter of cheekbones to sand down and an Adam’s Apple to reduce, bums to pad – if you really had the money you got new hands. The hands always gave it away – that is, if you wanted to pass for a woman.
Which many katoi didn’t. Darwin’s Choice always surfed older katoi who never had the basic equipment removed. “I am neither male, nor female,” he once told her. “I am not even an I, as such. No more than a human – a network of billions of neurons firing together – is truly an I. In assuming katoi, I feel closer to humanity, in many ways. I feel – divided, and yet whole.”
Like most of what he said, it didn’t make a lot of sense to her. He was one of the few Others who tried to understand humanity. Most Others existed within their networks, using rudimentary robots when they needed to interact with the physical world. But Darwin’s Choice liked to body-surf.
With him, she earned enough for the full body package.
And more than that.
Through him, she had discovered in herself a taste for controlled violence.
Boss Gui finally came gliding down the platform – fat-boy Gui, the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos in the pidgin of the asteroids. His Toads surrounded him – human/toad hybrids with Qi-engines running through them: able to inflate themselves at will, to jump higher and farther, to kill with the hiss of a poisoned, forked tongue – people moved away from them like water from a hot skillet. Quickly.
Boss Gui came and stood before her. “Well?” he demanded.
He looked old. Wrinkles covered his hands and face like scars. He looked tired, and cranky – which was understandable, under the circumstances.
She had recommended delaying the trip. The Old Man refused to listen. And that was that.
She said, “I cannot identify an obvious mark — ”
He smiled in satisfaction –
“But that is not to say there isn’t one.”
“I am Boss Gui!” he said. Toad-like, he inflated as he spoke. “Who dares try to kill me?”
“I did,” she said, and he chuckled – and deflated, just a little.
“But you didn’t, my little sparrow.”
They had reached an understanding, the two of them. She didn’t kill him – having to return the client’s fee had been a bitch – and he, in turn, gave her a job. It had security attached – a pension plan, full medical, housing and salary with benefits, calculated against inflation. There were even stock options.
She never regretted her decision – until now.
“It’s still too dangerous,” she said now. “You’re too close — ”
“Silence!” He regarded her through rheumy eyes. “I am Boss Gui, boss of the Kunming Toads!”
“We are a long way from Kunming.”
His eyes narrowed. “I am seventy-nine
years old and still alive. How old are you?”
“You know how old,” she said, and he laughed. “Sensitive about your age,” he said. “How like a woman.” He hawked up phlegm and spat on the ground. It hissed, burning a small, localised hole in the concrete.
She shrugged. “Your cabin is ready,” she said, then – “Sir.”
He nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Tell the driver we are ready to depart.”
A taste for controlled violence . . .
Darwin’s Choice used his human hosts hard. He strove to understand humanity. For that purpose he visited ping-pong shows, kickboxing exhibits, Louis Wu emporiums, freak shows, the Bangkok Opera House, shopping malls, temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, slums, high-rises and train stations.
“Life,” he once told her, “is a train station.”
She didn’t know what to make of that. What she did know: to understand humanity he tried what they did. His discarded bodies were left with heroin addiction, genital sores, hangovers and custom-made viruses that were supposed to self-destruct but not always did. Sometimes, either to apologise or for his own incomprehensible reasons, he would go into the cosmetic surgeries on Soi Cowboy and come out full transgender – seemingly unaware that his hosts may have preferred to remain in the pre-op stage. Sometimes he would wire them up in strange ways – for a month, at one point, he became a tentacle-junkie and would return from the clinics with a quivering mass of additional, aquatic limbs.
But it was his taste for danger – even while he experienced none, even while his true self kept running independently in the background, in a secure location somewhere on Earth or in orbit – that awakened her own.
The first time she killed a man . . .
Thy had gone looking for opium and found an ambush. The leader said, “Kill the flesh-rider and keep the katoi. We’ll sell her in — ”
She had acted instinctively. She didn’t know what she was doing until it was done. Her knife—
The blade flashing in the neon light—
A scream, cut short – a gurgle—
Blood ruined her second-best blouse—
The sound of something breaking – the pain only came later. They had smashed in her nose—
Darwin’s Choice watching—
She killed the second one with her bare hands, thumbs pressing on his wind-pipe until he stopped struggling—
She had laid him down on the ground almost tenderly—
Pain, making her scream, but her lungs wouldn’t work—
They hit her with a taser, but somehow she didn’t pass out—
She fell, but forward – hugging the man with the taser, sharing the current until there was only darkness.
“You were clinically dead,” he told her, later. He sounded impressed. “What was it like?”
“Like nothing,” she told him. “There was nothing there.”
“You were switched off?”
She had to laugh. “You could say that.”
They made love the night she was released from hospital. She licked his nipples, slowly, and felt him harden in her hand. She stroked him, burying her face in his full breasts. He reached down, touched her, and it was like electricity. She kept thinking of the dead men . . .
When she came he said, “You would do it again — ” It wasn’t a question.
She was tuning in to people’s nodes, picking up network traffic to and from – the Malay business guys were high-encryption/high-bandwidth clouds, impossible to hack through, but here and there—
Kid with vintage paperback was on a suitably retro-playlist with a random shuffle – she caught the Doors singing “The End” which was replaced with Thaitanium’s “Tom Yum Samurai” only to segue into Drunken Tiger’s “Great Rebirth.” Issan-girl was plugged in – a humming battery was sending a low current into her brain. She’ll be out for the journey . . . The K-pop princess was playing Guilds of Ashkelon. So were her entourage. The French backpackers were stoned on one thing or the other. Others were chatting, stretching, reading, farting, tidying away bags and ordering drinks – life on board the night train to Nong Khai was always the same.
The train was coming alive, the slug belching steam – the whole train shuddered as it began to crawl along the smooth tracks, slug-boys falling off it like fleas.
Tuning, scanning – someone two cars down watching the feed from a reality-porn channel, naked bodies woven together like a tapestry, a beach somewhere – Koh Samui or an off-Earth habitat, it was impossible to say.
Boss Gui: “I’m hungry!”
Mulan Rouge: “Food’s coming — ” in the dining car they were getting ready, a wok already going, rice cooker steaming, crates of beer waiting –
“I want kimchi!”
“I’ll see if they have any — ” though she knew they didn’t.
“No need — ” a long, slow, drawn-out hum from one of the Toads. “I keep for boss.”
Limited vocabulary – you didn’t breed Toads for their brains. Though she had to wonder . . . “Keep in cooler.”
She watched the Toad reach into what the Australians called an esky. There was a jar of kimchi in there, and . . . other stuff.
Like a jar of living flies, for the Toads. Like what appeared to be a foetal sack, preserved in dry ice . . .
Other things.
She left them to it, returned to watching – waiting.
“You would do it again,” Darwin’s Choice had said. And he – she – it – was right. She had liked it – a sense of overwhelming power came with violence, and if it could be controlled, it could be used. Power depended on how you used it.
She counted the proceeding years in augmentations and bodies. Three in Vientiane – she had followed Darwin’s Choice there to buy up a stash of primitive communist VR art – the deal went wrong and she had to execute two men and a woman before they got away. She had snake-eyes installed after that. A man and a katoi in Chiang Mai – DC was buying a genuine Guilds of Ashkelon virtual artefact that had turned out to be a fake. She had had her skeleton strengthened following that . . .
With each kill, new parts of her. With each, more power – but never over him.
Gradually, Darwin’s Choice appeared less and less in the flesh. She had to cast around for work, hiring out as bodyguard, enforcer – hired killer, sometimes, only sometimes. Finally DC never reappeared. He had tried to explain it to her, once . . .
“We are I-loops but, unlike humans, we are self-aware I-loops. Not self-aware in the sense of consciousness, or what humans call consciousness. Self-aware in the sense that we are – we can – know every loop, every routine and sub-routine. Digital, not neurological. And as we are aware so do we change, mutating code, merging code, sharing . . .”
“Is that how you make love?”
“Love is a physical thing,” he said. “It’s hormone-driven.”
“You can only feel love when you’re body-surfing?”
He only shrugged.
“How do you . . .” she searched for the word, settled on – “mate?”
Imagine two or more Others. Endless lines of code meeting in digital space – IFs and ANDs and ORs branching into probabilities, cycling through endless branches of logic at close to the speed of light –
“Is that what you’re like?”
“No. Shh . . .”
. . . and meeting, merging, mixing, mutating – “And dying, to be an Other is to die, again and again, to evolve with every cycle, to cull and select and grow, achieve new, unexpected forms – ”
. . . not so much mating as joining, and splitting, and joining again – “The way a human may, over seven years, replace every single atom in their bodies, but still retain the illusion of person, remain an I-loop — ”
. . . but for Others, it meant becoming something new – “Giving birth to one’s self, in essence.”
The body he was surfing had been stoned, then, when he told her all this. When he was gone, she hired out. She enjoyed the work, but freel
ancing was hard. When the contract on Boss Giu came, she took it – and upgraded to corporate.
“We are never alone,” DC told her, just before he left forever. “There are always . . . us. So many of us . . .”
“Can’t you all join?” she had asked. “Join in to one?”
“Too much code slows you down,” he said. “We have . . . limits. Though we share, too – share the way humans can’t.”
“We can share in ways you can’t,” she said. Her finger dug into his anus when she spoke. DC squirmed under her, then gave a small moan. His breasts were freckled, his penis circumcised. “True,” he said – whispered – and drew her to him with an urgency they were sharing only rarely, by then.
That had been the last time . . .
She wondered which species’ sharing was better – figured she would never know.
They said sex was overrated . . .
Yankee boy blue was no longer listening to the Doors – she couldn’t sense his node anymore at all. She blinked, feeling panic rise. How did he slip past her? Scanning for him – his vintage sci fi paperback was left on his bunk.
Shit.
She glanced back into the cabin – Boss Gui glared up at her, then clutched his bloated stomach and gave a groan. The two Toads jumped – too hard, and hit the ceiling.
Double shit – she said, “What’s wrong?” but knew.
He said, “It’s starting.”
She shook her head – no. “It can’t. It’s too soon.”
“It’s time.”
“Shit!” – a third time, and it was counter-productive and she knew it.
Boss Gui’s face was twisted in pain. “It’s coming!”
And suddenly she picked up the North American’s node.
“Sh — ”
They were going to Nong Khai, from there to cross into Laos. Boss Gui wanted to expand the business, and business was booming in a place called Vang Vieng, a tawdry little mini-Macau at the foothills of the mountains, four hours from Vientiane – a place of carefully regulated lawlessness, of cheap opium and cheaper synths, of games-worlds cowboys and body hackers, of tentacle-junkies and doll emporiums and government taxes that Boss Gui wanted a part of.
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