by James Newman
We moved through, past the costumes of the Fun empire through a double door and into the corridor of the Eye. Memories of the Punch flickered, wheeled through the corridors trying to bite the strip of leather in half, blindfolded, voices, some calm and cool voices belonging to the academic erudite elite who were the Fun City doctors. Other voices shrill and excited, some voices were hardly human, some voices were silent, inferred to rather than heard, turned to Trixie. “You too, huh?” She says.
Yes me too, through the corridors, the brain of the city, the Eye flickering, never closed. Double doors we entered, security cameras on all four walls, eyes within the Eye. A patient strapped to a bed, two medics with clipboards and a Punch officer to administer the nightmare as the patient’s attitude is adjusted. Thrashing on the bed, his face partially concealed by the VR goggles, we move closer. Trixie goes for the holstered Glock on the officer’s hip. Snatches at it, officer turns into my fist followed by a foot to the groin and he’s down for a moment before rolling to a desk and hitting a switch. Medics’ hands go up as the weapon in Trixie’s hand does. “Sit,” I tell them, “or remain still.”
Trixie issues commands into her life-enhancer device.
“Here to remove a spider,” I say to the bearded one.
“But...”
“But nothing. You need to prepare the removal fair enough. Trixie take that bed over there, the one next to the table. Yeah.”
“We need to call the nurse.”
“Do it. Trixie, take the bed.”
She lies on the bed. A nurse materializes and attaches a rubber cap, the machines around her beep and whirl, lights flash as the manipulator lowers down, and a sensor stops at her nose. I hold her hand as the machine’s periscopic manipulator rides the channel up her nasal passage, twists three hundred and sixty degrees and pulls out the implant.
Swapping places, the machines once again begin their work. The connection is certain and the pull is swift as the object dislodges and the spider is spat out.
A sudden intense wave of euphoria followed by a sense of calm, a slowing down in rhythm to the natural pace of life becomes inherent. Flash back of the dungeon, the plant, capsules, Trixie’s story about the boys and the butterfly, Blue’s knife cutting the flower, the office, morphologist, promises from Kelly, Kurt the French singer, Hugh the American with the semi-naked houseguest. All this plays back like a silent movie on triple speed. Characters come into focus and then fade again to the back of the picture.
A return of free will.
Lights flash.
Double doors open.
The man-with-no-hands flanked by two officers. His smile is crooked and ugly. “Did I miss the show?” He walks to a door and opens it. “Follow me, Dylan.”
Through the door and into another laboratory, the Punch memories coming clearer now, was I somehow shown the future through that mask? Lights flash, trollies roll, nurses, medics, man-with-no-hands walks towards the centerpiece of the room.
“Welcome to the Eye, Joe.”
FORTY-FIVE
THE MAN with no hands smiled cold with crooked lips. He strapped himself into the machine, into several control panels and manipulators, the nerve endings connecting to his stumps were sending communications to the mainframe computer. Impossible calculations were made with rapid movements. Several screens swing down like periscopes in a submarine. “Welcome to the Eye, Joe, I can see everything up here. Every time Mr. Jones leaves Mrs. Jones to visit little Miss Squeeze, I’ll be here watching, Joe. Every slip, every swig, every broken promise, every bad word, each and every digression will be watched and recorded by somebody like me. I designed this. Dylan, the Eye is my invention, the S.P.I.D.E.R. just a little bit of transhumanist fun. Don’t feel bad about it, Dylan. You were always on my shit list since...”
“Figures,” I tell him. “The overseer of morality in the world’s most immoral city is a whore mongering alcoholic who lives with an eight year old child.”
“Nine years old, Joe. But, hey, come on. Who’s counting? You’ve heard her play piano.”
“I give you that, but what happens when she grows up and looks back on her childhood? The childhood you robbed from her.”
“It is nothing. Your son robbed me of my hands. You know how that feels? Every time I look at your face, I see that boy with a machete. Revenge is a sweet thing, Dylan.”
Five men in suits sat at various control panels tapping away onto keyboards. The man-with-no-hands slid out of the apparatus and approached. “Now, normally the Punch doesn’t accept repeat visitors. But with you two lovely people, the council has decided to make a special rule. ‘They can go in, as long as you don’t come out again,’ I think they said. So I’ve designed much of the new program myself, tailor made to your perfect nightmares.”
“Must have taken some research?”
“Oh yes, it did, years of research.”
FORTY-SIX
GOING UNDER, they call it. That’s the term for the beginning of the Punch. Your life is played back to you. Not the parts that you remember, no, the parts that you forgot, or tried your best to forget. A man or woman is simply the sum of mistakes he or she makes in one lifetime. Everyday thousands of mistakes are made from anticipating what the stranger in the street is thinking to neglecting a starving child. The Punch plays those mistakes back to you. Millions of errors detailed in horrific Technicolor.
Going under.
When our eyes opened we thought we were still under the city. The truth is I’m still not sure if what happened down there was part of the Punch, the Devil’s Breath or a living nightmare.
Some new Punch angle perhaps? Maybe it was real and maybe it wasn’t.
The images had audio.
Faint at first.
The rumbling of rubber on concrete and the soft echoing of voices rose into the room. Traveling through time back to the Neptune in Leather, upstairs a man stood at the bar drinking, a puffin perched on his shoulder. A woman walked an otter on a leash.
Going under.
Trixie’s apartment overlooking the beach, the night sky heavy with pollution in a starless night. Her thighs gripping mine as dawn delivered her ugly promise.
Lights flashed and officers stood up from their desks.
Life-enhancer buzzed as the credits ticked down.
The door opened.
Going under.
Overhead lights clicked on. So bright they burn. A sound vibrated through internal speakers. A low frequency drone shook the walls. The room span with confused panic. First through was High Tower, conjoined twin attached to his chest brandishing a .22. He fired a shot that dug into a guard’s shoulder. They must have followed us through, I thought, before wondering if this was just a piece in the Punch puzzle.
Going under.
One.
Two.
Three.
Rachael, the dwarf karaoke singer ran at the radio controller, leaping into the air as she tore at his throat, they fell onto the ground scrambling for purchase on one another like two dogs in the dirt. My mind span back to the tunnel, the journey through it and out into Happy Street where Frankie the Rat peddled his scopolamine.
Had things ever been normal since the Devil’s Breath? Were we still under the influence, drifting around, hallucinated as we were in the Fun City Punch.
Trixie tugged my arm and moved towards a control panel. She looked at dials and levers and smiles and now I know that she must also realize that the world is tripping along with us. “The audio shutdown must be somewhere,” she ran a fingernail across a range of controls, “here.”
“What are you talking about?”
The walls stopped shaking. “Follow me,” she headed towards a set of double doors and I find my legs supporting me as my mind whirls. A Burmese wolf girl threw herself wildly at a horse-mouthed guard who winced back in both fear and disgust as she disarmed him and sprayed a line of lead across the room. Somewhere, slowly, a cockroach died. Beyond them, a long neck tussled an officer to the
ground and straddled him, glaring down as he lay frozen unable to get a grip on her long row of copper coils.
Black teeth smiled strapped into the Eye.
We press further towards the tunnel
Going under...
A bearded woman, a matchstick man, an alarm shrilled as screams and gunshots filled the room.
Blue comes in swinging his trombone with bayonet attached. He slices and stabs at the officers. Through to a laboratory, the whirl of hard drives, printouts, the man-with-no-hands disappears through double-doors, a hospital bed with a rubber cap, sensors, manipulators, metal tongs, a nurse stands with a syringe. Trixie grabs her by the arm and she shouts a command to the nurse, pats the bed, outside, the cries and screams of the City, of the Push.
The Resistance.
Beyond the lab and on up to a white room with white walls and a white ceiling. Two Gamers, one either side of the man-with-no-hands. One holds his machete. The other pouts with a life-enhancer device in her hand.
An object flies across the room, lands in my right hand, a crowbar.
The lights flash. “Thought you might need this,” Jimmy smiles.
“Are the twins with you? Take them to the lab,” I shout before a second wave of guards pile through the building and the only way is back, back through the tunnels and out into the city.; Jimmy shouts commands and pushes his way back through the tunnel. We move deeper into the rabbit warren, the rats net under the city and back up into the overland.
Going over.
Back at the temple, the sun set over the doomed city occasioning clouds to glow orange and pink, radiated by the night pollution. We sat up all night talking about the next Push, the weakness of the Eye, strategies compared and weighed up. As the night finally turned to day, I wondered, again, if the scopolamine had really woven its magic, and if we were right back there in the bar beneath the jazz band riding the first wave of that awful jungle medicine.
Trixie’s smile did not confirm nor deny this.
But she was like that.
She was a real solid trip.
FORTY-SEVEN
LUCAS RAISED the coffee glass to his mouth and breathed heavily. The old man was tired. But the fatigue was not physical. It was more of a spiritual fatigue, he had simply seen too much life in a short space of time and there was little room for more experience.
“Kurt had been through a lot,” I told him. “Fame as a young man is difficult to take. It breeds paranoia; trust in others dwindles in supply when you are at the top. He came here expecting a new life and it was a new start at first, but Kurt had seen his credits run down. He had experienced the Punch and he had been implanted.”
“The Punch?”
“Yes. He was reconditioned to be a good citizen, but sometimes being a good citizen isn’t what we were originally pre-programmed to be. And who says that one cannot be a good citizen and use the leisure facilities of the city? It is a strange pinball machine we find ourselves bouncing around in, and Kurt decided to slip between the flippers and fall into the bowels of the machine. He became part of The Resistance. A tunnel rat, probing at the machine, trying to find a way to rewire it. The city rewarded him for his interference with a brain implant. The same type of implant I received for tracking him.”
“So, my theory was correct. This was not a suicide.”
“Technically it was a suicide, sir, but he was pushed to it. This whole thing raises an interesting question. Was he pushed or did he fall?”
“And?”
“You will have to answer that yourself, sir. All the details are in the report,” I passed him a folder and slipped across my life-enhancer device. “Fifteen years ago we might have blamed the girl that led the guy to jump off the balcony. We may have blamed the friends who shunned him once he lost all his money. We may blame the guy on the corner store who sold him a bottle of Tiger Sweat each and every day. But the thing is, it is still the man who jumped off the balcony. He is the one who took the leap. Nowadays, things aren’t that simple.”
He sighed, held his life-enhancer to mine, and made the transaction. I checked the balance. Enough to buy a ticket out of the city, enough to rent a place other than a short time room in a fleabag hotel. But room 303 had grown on me. I’m sitting in here now, tapping away this story. The blinds are down in my windowless room and the music from across the street is haunting and lonely. A guitar and a tenor saxophone tangle together as someone somewhere brushes the leather. Somewhere a Tom Cat screams at the world but the world doesn’t care.
And why should it?
THE END
THANKS TO Hugh Gallagher for looking at the early drafts and helping push it forward. Special thanks for the brainstorming session between games of six-ball where Hugh hit on the Punch name before beating me at pool on the seventh road Flamingo table. Thanks to Edward Roche for encouraging my new world directions once the Punch idea fell into place following that drive back from the beach. Thanks to Collin for helping me fix some of the grammar as the story progressed. I hope I am getting better, but do apologize for the oversights that have undoubtedly made it into print. Thanks to the editorial and design team - Torrie Cooney, and Frankie Sutton for their work on this series. And as always, thanks to John Daysh who helped burn several moths (metaphorically speaking) throughout this one and more, hopefully, to come. Thanks to L7, Grace Jones, Compulsion and Hole for the soundtrack. Mostly thanks to you, the reader. Without you guys, this doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, but I’d do it anyway.
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