Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Then once I was out of the door – relieved to hear the last of Johny Cock and his Fuckheads screaming, “DIE BITCH DIE!” – I clambered on to my flybike and soared away. The air was rich in hog fat and the tang of wind-dried-chicken snacks from the stalls below. My heart was pounding. I wanted to cry, though I knew that would not have been appropriate at such a moment of remorseless nemesis.

  Instead, I looped the loop, savouring the sight beneath me of broad city streets and coiling alleyways, shacks and stalls and red-brick mansions and towering fabricator pyramids of Laguid, capital city of Cúchulainn. A city which for many years had been my home, and then had been my prison.

  Hamilton Brandish had been a good man, or so his friends all thought. And that’s what the obituaries would say too.

  But I knew different.

  Jonathan Cramer had a talent for love.

  His wife loved him, and not because of his looks – for he was average in appearance, chubby, and cheerful in a way that precludes mystique. But he was also charismatic, and funny, and very gentle. Women felt safe with Jonathan; he invited their friendship, not their lust.

  And his kids loved him because he was a great dad; he gave them money, did funny voices and even the occasional idiotic walk, and never told them off. He also played football with them in the park, and never seemed to let them win, even when he did.

  I knew all this because I’d had him under surveillance for two months, and I knew everything about him.

  His brothers and sisters and numerous cousins loved Jonathan because he was kind and entertaining, and always organised the family get-togethers.

  And he was blessed with more best friends than anyone you could name; and they all loved him because he was generous and loyal and always knew what to say when they were feeling blue.

  Hell, even I had loved him once.

  But my love for Jonathan was not, let me be clear about this, true love. Not love as the poets know it. Not love at all in fact – not when you have a pain nodule in your brain that your lover can stimulate with a single remote control button. Or when you are beaten and forced to endure… stuff, terrible stuff, three times a day and every day by a man who then has the nerve to claim he adores you, and that you are his reason for being alive.

  What the fuck, do I have to draw a fucking diagram?

  Jonathan was a dealer in brain-chip hook-ups, and his products had killed an awful lot of people over the years. Which was not his fault! Or so he always claimed. If addicts want to abuse a recreational aid, there’s nothing you can do about it – that’s what he argued, cogently and persuasively, in numerous articles published on websites owned by him.

  Jonathan had patented his own design of brain-chip hook-up which he called the Armchair Universe. It allowed families to sit around travelling the stars or exploring alien planets. But of course the Armchair Universe was even better suited to those who wished to spend their days having virtual sex with porn stars, or vicariously raping and murdering innocents. A whole industry had grown up tasked with providing the raw sensual data necessary to create these virtual experiences. Actors won’t suffice, you see – you need to inflict actual atrocity and/or death upon your hapless victims, in order to obtain sufficiently rich and authentic emotional resonances.

  None of this is new. Evil people have always lapped up the fear of their victims. That’s how the vampire legend was born. Check out the life story of Vlad Dracul Tepes, and you’ll see why they called him The Impaler.3 That bastard used to – no, I won’t even repeat it.

  Modern technology, however – bear with me, I’m going to bang on about this, it’s a favourite theme of mine – carries with it a terrible consequence. It normalises evil. It makes it commonplace. How many of you own an Armchair Universe? Hmm? You, you, you – most of you, am I right? And I’m guessing you are aware that although you only use this technology for educational and informative purposes, with maybe the occasional bit of high-end erotica thrown in – it can be also used for “bad stuff.”

  Yet you still buy the latest AU upgrades. You probably have the Family Adventure sims with the Cuddly Dinosaur Experience, and the cute Alien Photography Safari. And maybe even, from time to time, you take a walk on the wild side while your wife is on holiday, or your husband is on a business trip? Hmm? And you spend a wicked hour or so savouring a real-life shoot-’em-up, or an alien-fucker-killing blood-fest, or a non-consensual sex scene, involving real sex, and real tears? And do you know what?

  You shouldn’t be doing it.

  IT IS NOT FUCKING NORMAL.

  Jonathan had bodyguards, and his bodyguards were all his close personal friends. Yeah, he inspired that kind of intimacy even with doltish muscle-bound killers. He always knew their names, and asked the right questions – like “How’s your baby daughter?” “Hey, it’s your birthday today isn’t it?” And in consequence, they were devoted to him. These guys and girls were trained and indoctrinated to take the bullet for their principal, whoever that might be. But for Jonathan they’d take the bullet, shit it out their arse, then shoot themselves with it again.

  Infiltrating an organisation like that was hard.

  However, I did it.

  I got close to him, and the mollyfocker died.

  You may notice I’ve skipped a few stages in the story here – you’ll see why in a moment – but let me cut to the dénouement. I killed the evil bastard. I took my revenge for all the things he had done to me, and for actually recording my pain and distress. (Hey, you didn’t know I was an AU movie star did you? But you don’t actually see me in those shows, you just inhabited my fucking agony.

  Don’t get me started…)

  For all of these crimes against humanity and against me, I butchered Jonathan Cramer in the middle of the night, in his own hotel room. And I laughed as I watched him die.

  But, you may ask, how did I manage to sneak past Jonathan’s bodyguards? How could I get close to a man so heavily protected that bacteria were scanned for concealed weaponry before they entered his mouth?

  Simple.

  First, I bugged Jonathan’s MI when he was booking an extreme-sex whore to come to his room and pleasure him.

  Lucky guess, huh? Who’d have thought he’d want to do that?!

  And then I hacked the company’s computer to replicate the ID disc of the girl they were sending.

  Then, when the girl – Lara was her name – turned up in a flytaxi, I intercepted her. Lara was a real beauty, I have to tell you that. She had perfect cheek bones and blazing eyes, and she dressed with all the understated elegance of an Egyptian queen bound for her sarcophagus. And I stopped her before she could enter the hotel, and offered her a deal she couldn’t refuse. A shitload of money, and a ticket off this godsforsaken planet.

  Bear in mind that those tickets are incredibly hard to get. You need a lot of money (which I have, after a life of crime I haven’t had time to recount).4 And you also, most vitally, need a signed and authenticated letter of transit from the Laguid Chief of Police. Which I had been able to expertly forge using the security codes still in the brain chip of the previous Chief of Police.

  Namely Robbie Ferguson, who you will recall I had slain on Giger’s Moon. Yeah, there was a reason for that whole cutting-the-skull-open thing.

  So I made my pitch, and Lara was shocked. And clearly afraid, because she had a contract with her agency, and those guys are fucking killers. And, understandably cautious, since she didn’t know who the fuck I was.

  And so she said no.

  Damn!

  So I told her that’s fine, off you go then. Gritting my teeth, and kicking myself on the collapse of my great strategy.

  And yeah I know, I could of course have just killed her, and taken her ID. But I didn’t really want to do that.

  Call me soft, see if I care!

  You see I liked Lara. She was a nice girl, I’d vouch for that. I’ve known a lot of girls like Lara, you can tell the good ones right off.

  However – fortunately
for my evil plan – Lara thought twice. And she told me she would leave, but only if I gave her five tickets off the planet. For her, her boyfriend, her parents, and her best friend Jillian.

  I’d anticipated this, and had the tickets and LOTs ready in all those names.

  She kissed me on the cheek, both cheeks in fact, before she got back in the flytaxi and left for her new life. I guess I’d made her day.

  Having done all this – and still feeling the touch of Lara’s eternal gratitude on my cheeks – I made my way to Jonathan’s room and showed my ID and job docket to his bodyguards.

  They then checked with the escort agency who confirmed my identity, based on seeing my image on their MIs, via a security guard’s camera-eyes. But they didn’t see me, they saw her. Another of my cute tricks.

  And then I went inside the room.

  And I locked the door behind me.

  And I fixed Jonathan with my fiercest stare.

  We were in his luxury suite, no bodyguards, just me and him. The pad was très cool, with stucco pillars in the Composite style, and a planetarium-type roof with fake stars. And an in-room splash pool flanked with life-size nude statues cast in eerily warm bronze. And a draught soda dispenser shaped like a phallus, which I just adored – and a few other bespoke touches.

  Namely, the bed. Fully equipped with chains and shackles. A bird-cage large enough to take three writhing dancers. And hammocks dangling from the ceiling; and I don’t mean the ones you sleep in.

  Jonathan was almost salivating with joy at the sight of my severe look, tightly-bunned hair, and shiny black leather raincoat that hinted at nudity beneath.

  Then I took my coat off to reveal that my body was in fact clad in a skin-tight leather cat-suit that gripped as tight as talons. It was uncomfortable as fuck, but it did the job. It put Jonathan at his ease. It disabled his “civilised” settings. And hence, it turned him into the slavering animal he really was.

  And then I opened up my leather Bag of Pain, emblazoned with silver studs and bosses – it weighed a fucking ton – and I handed Jonathan my whip with the barbed wire strands.

  Then I offered, with a sweet little smile, to let him use it on me. And I licked my lips and smiled an even sweeter little smile, and told him he was a “very naughty boy.” And the look of excitement in his eyes told me all I needed to know about Jonathan. He hadn’t changed at all.

  And then, when he came at me with the whip in his hand and hate in his eyes, I killed the bastard.

  They called it a reign of terror, and the press went wild for it. They even gave me a nickname.

  The Heartstealer.

  Over the space of seven months, dozens of “innocent” citizens of Laguid were gunned down or stabbed or otherwise slain by the Heartstealer. And the connecting factor – look, I wasn’t going to be subtle about it – was that all the victims had their hearts cut out, then inserted into their open mouths.

  Some journalists speculated that the killer was a woman who had once had her heart stolen then broken by a man.

  Ha! I knew they’d say that!

  There was in fact a reason, a much darker reason, for the heart motif, but I won’t tell you what it is. It’s – not good, and involves ritual acts of various kinds. Suffice to say: this was my coded message to Daxox and all his associates that someone who knew what evil they had done was coming to get them.

  But they didn’t, not at first, know who. Because a great many people had just as much reason as I did to take revenge using the ripped-out heart as their symbol.

  I murdered six people in that first week. And then I carried on killing. I shot them. Garrotted them. Impaled them on swords. One time I was forced to break my MO and shoot my victim with a long-distance high-velocity projectile rifle. He was stepping out of his armoured car into the armoured tunnel that led to his armoured office. And so I fired a bullet at the door of his car and killed him with the ricochet. (Later, however, I broke into the mortuary. And that’s when I ripped the heart out and put it in his mouth. Well, you know, it’s important to be consistent.)

  By week two, I was finding it harder and harder to make the hits. But I persevered, and prevailed. I had many identities, and many homes. Hotel rooms, alleys, deserted fabricator buildings, unused office blocks. I never slept in the same place two nights in a row, and I never had the same hair colour two days running. My brain chip and eyeball-sensors were attuned to detect the presence of police surveillance teams. And I was confident that I was never followed, for my Rebus chip was deeply entangled in the inner workings of Magog, the Laguid QRC. So I was able to follow the police investigation in the minutest detail. And as a consequence, I was ahead of them every step of the way.

  Getting on the planet in the first place – that was the hardest part.

  Because, of course, the Cúchulainn Clanning was at this time an ally of the SNG government and hence at war with many of the other Clannings. And so entry to the system was strictly controlled. (In the old days, by contrast, it was very easy to enter – but extremely hard to get out again.)

  And my name of course was on high on the Clan’s Most Wanted list, after I’d fled their custody some years before, killing several people as I went. That’s why I had changed my appearance, and my identity, right at the very start of this mission of vengeance.

  But by the time I arrived in the Cúchulainn system I had ID that identified me as Evelyn Walker, an associate and friend of Robbie Ferguson, former Chief of Police and national hero. I knew everything about the real Evelyn, because I had forged her ID based on Robbie’s datafiles on her. And I was also able to use Robbie’s detailed memories of the planet’s security codes to fast-track my way through. I passed through eighty-four security checks, including a strip search, without so much as a raised eyebrow.

  Those added up to several other reasons why I took the brain chip from Robbie Ferguson. It held the passcodes to every police database, and detailed memories about who to bribe and how much, and how to circumvent the myriad police surveillance systems. Later on, I carried his brain chip around inside my bag, hooked to a palm computer; whenever I needed help, I asked Robbie Ferguson.

  It was Robbie Ferguson who got me back into the city I had once fled in abject fear. And it was Robbie who helped me to stay one step ahead of the police for so long.

  Thanks, Robbie!

  It was strange to be back here in Laguid.

  The streets of Cúchulainn’s sprawling, massive, appallingly polluted capital city had the eerie allure of the familiar yet half-forgotten. My heart always soared when the factory bells tolled. I thrilled to the sounds of water lapping against the metal stilts on which the canal-side houses jauntily perched. I loved the stench of spices and of animals, both Earthian and genetically modified alien, roasting on spits in the thronging street markets. I loved the energy of the locals, their lilting accent, their fondness for irascible barter.

  When the first colonists arrived, they had terraformed this bleak and lifeless planet until it became a verdant Eden. Then they fucked it up. The air is now thick with pollutants. The skies are black with clouds spewed out of thick cooling towers. It’s hard to tell one species of bird from another for they are all coated in soot.

  It may be the ugliest planet in the universe.

  Hamilton Brandish had powerful friends in the police department – including the Police Commissioner himself, Felix Denison.

  And oh, I remembered Felix well. He once promised he’d help me escape from my – well, from the place where I had been trapped. It proved to be a lie. A lie that broke my heart.

  Felix Denison was a big man with a ginger moustache and vast sideburns that defied fashion and indeed hygiene. He also had a twinkle in his eye that belied his brutal nature.

  He had a reputation for “telling it straight.” Which meant that when he lied, he did so boldly and fearlessly.

  And he was telling it straight tonight, as he made his public press statement about the serial killer terror in Laguid. His voice
boomed, his carefully scrubbed whiskers quivered with emotion. And his blue eyes looked right into the news cameras, and thus into the souls of his listeners.

  I listened to his crap with half an ear. The rest of my attention was focused on the crowd, the entrances and exits, the guards and all other potential sources of danger, and on my inner core. That place I go to in order to achieve a zen-like state of tranquillity, just before I embark upon appalling slaughter.

  “—this evil beast!” roared Denison, “is a threat to our civilisation and—”

  Bastard, I thought to myself.

  “—unspeakable butchery, that cannot be—”

  Bastard.

  “—we’ll find this savage immoral blood-drenched killer and lock him or her up and then we’ll—”

  Bastard!

  I should point out that while I’d been doing my bloody work – fifteen dead so far – a sniper in the East Quarter Fabricator District had killed forty-three factory and mine workers – out of whim, malice or sheer petty class hatred, no one knew for sure. Yet there was no news coverage of these atrocities. Denison’s police officers barely took the trouble to investigate them. That’s because the victims were manual workers, the people whose toil and sweat held this society together. So, hey, who gave a fuck?

  Instead, all the resources and energy of this highly funded and magnificently well-trained police force went into finding the Heartstealer. The killer of respectable citizens, who threatened the cosy hegemony of this planet.

  And they weren’t doing so well. There were no clues, no useful witness evidence, no DNA traces, no data trail. Nada. The police theorised openly that I was “pretty damned lucky.”

  But hey, you make your own luck, that’s what I always say. And one of the secrets of my success – apart from the fact I had the brain of the ex-Chief of Police in my bag, and an ability to access the Cúchulainn QRC and hence generate fake IDs – is that I knew how to change my appearance and body language. As I was doing today – for I was there at the press conference as the red-haired swotty girl from the Laguid Metropolitan News. The geeky one with the awkward way of standing with hands poised, as if dancing on ice; and who peered at the world through thick eyeglasses, betraying her as too poor to buy eye-rejuve.