by Graeme Hurry
The power grid was turned off at night. There was a strict ban on power-consuming activities after dark-fall. Most people went to bed at sunset and rose at first light. I thumbed the switch on the torch and lost my footing twice on the way down. I was in too much of a hurry. Still, I wasn’t fast enough.
In a puddle of yellow light made by the portable, I saw Lemuel Gurnsback sprawled out on the hemp rug at the foot of the stairs. There was blood leaking from his ear and a nasty gash over his left eye. He wasn’t moving.
The male sim was standing over him with a hammer, wearing the same yoga pants, his feet bare and bloody. He had walked a long way. My front door was broken and splintered. My sofa had been overturned and a wall of books had been emptied onto the floor.
The sim looked up at me, his eyes widening. He croaked unintelligibly. I knew he was trying hard to speak to me, to explain himself despite his failing mind.
I descended the last few steps slowly, certain that the tough detective was just injured, not dead. I thought I could resolve things. In a civil society an authoritative but caring voice can defuse nearly any crisis. At least that was what I’d always been taught. But things had gone too far for that. Just how far I didn’t know.
“Put it down,” I said to the sim. I made a dropping gesture with my free hand that was easy to understand. “You didn’t mean to hurt him. I know that.”
The sim gripped the hammer harder, his knuckles whitening, and made a rasping, agonized noise. He waved the weapon at the broken door and the night beyond and muttered angrily.
It was obvious to me that he was quite confused and excited and it would take time to calm him. As I said, I’m a teacher. I work with small children every day. I’m quite used to agitated and unpredictable behavior and I know how to handle it.
I didn’t feel threatened. I was more concerned about Lem than harm to myself. The fragments of a story were already falling into place in my thoughts. The sim was infatuated and it had followed me here with something on its broken mind. Lem had been patrolling the area, tracking it. He had seen the toy man break down my door. Concerned and eager to capture it, he had followed the thing inside. A brief struggle ensued in the dark room and he got the worst of it, probably tripped and hit his head. His buddies would give him a lot of grief about being beaten up by a doll. It would be funny tomorrow, a big joke.
Pansy sniffed the detective’s prostrate form, her small tail jerking with agitation. I shooed her away and she skittered into the kitchen where she resumed barking.
I bent and laid a hand on the back of the man’s head. “Lem,” I said gently. “Wake up. Come on. You’re fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. My hand came away sticky with blood and brain matter. The hammer had caved in the back of his skull. I looked at the sim, horrified.
That was when he grabbed me, nearly yanking me out of my robe. He dragged me out of the house and across the dirt patch that functioned as my front lawn. I remember screaming for help and then just screaming. No one came.
I saw fleeting shadows. I thought I heard distant gunshots.
The sim shoved me into Gurnsback’s gray Overlander and climbed into the driver’s seat like he knew what he was doing. He did. He cranked the engine and backed out of my driveway as if he had been doing it for years.
There was that familiar thing again. I was sobbing and in a complete panic but I didn’t fail to notice how he rested his arm on the back of the seat and whistled a short tune while he cranked his head around and checked the rear view, looking for obstructions.
My late husband had always done the same thing. Seeing his strong arm on the seat meant one thing to me then, that keeping us safe was something he did naturally. He did it without thought. He was my hero.
The tune Scotty whistled was the same one always, the opening bars of ‘God Save the Queen’. Lord knows why that little ditty was part of his subconscious process. There hadn’t been a British monarchy for two hundred years. There was no United Kingdom. In one fell swoop the Continuum did away with all that bureaucratic, jingoistic, nation-state nonsense. Then what did the victors go and do? They instituted their own bureaucratic, jingoistic, nation-state nonsense. Through it all the Civil Service survived and continued to regulate and nanny us to death across the myriad light-years of space.
The sim was whistling ‘God Save the Queen’.
Bewildered, I lapsed against the passenger door and asked, “What’s happening?”
The sim barely glanced at me. His eyes were on the night. He patted my knee, another thing Scotty always did when I was upset.
The car slowed to a halt near the ramp to the main highway while he looked left and right. A woman came out of the darkness. She threw herself against the passenger window, scrabbling desperately for a handhold. Her fingernails were broken and bloody. Our eyes locked. It was Maudy Green, my neighbor. She was naked from the waist up. Something grabbed her long white hair and dragged her away. I’ve never heard anyone scream the way she did. She sounded like a wounded, dying animal.
I tried the door handle. The security locks were down. Only the driver could override them. The car was in the process of surrendering control to the traffic grid. Independent driving wasn’t permitted on the expressway which ran directly to the government facilities, the airfield and the remote desert communities of Hopi and Bordertown.
There was a soft chime and the Overlander’s robotic voice said, “Please remove your hands from the steering wheel. Please remove your hands from the steering wheel.”
The sim obeyed with a murmur of concern and the car swung onto the highway.
“What’s happening?” I asked him.
He turned to me then. The eyes weren’t the same but Scotty was somewhere inside him. I was sure of it. A wife knows her husband, the tilt of his head, the way his lips come together, the wondering soul that lights him up. I had felt that soul go right through me like an electric shock when he departed the mortal plane. I was holding his warm hand at the time. I saw the light in him wink out.
But now he was back. He had come around again, like every damn thing on Bellepheron. He had returned in the form of a demented, murdering sim. I seized on the idea that it was all a dream. It had to be a dream. But it wasn’t.
The sim choked out two words, “Anna… safe.” Then he turned on the radio and I heard the All-Source broadcast which was downloaded to sets by the Tek. The Tek was a satellite that maintained real-time communication with Earth via displaced light waves.
“…uncertain. Similacra have committed numerous violent acts against the human population on Bellepheron. This outbreak of unprecedented behavior on the part of similacra is being attributed to a virus or an infection in organic materials commonly used in manufacturing, which is done planet-side at the Algonquin River Facility in Bordertown. The plant was recently closed due to an industrial accident. A subsequent fire destroyed the principal labs, delaying completion of the accident investigation.
“Officials are encouraging citizens to remain indoors until the similacra are contained and destroyed. In entertainment news across the colonies, Tommy Pop is top of the charts this week and Tom Cruise is doing well after another successful resuscitation. Movie makers are scheduled to roll him out for his sixth film in the last one hundred…”
The sim turned off the radio and gazed at me significantly.
“You’re protecting me,” I said. “You knew something bad was going to happen and you came to make sure I was safe. Is that it?
“Safe,” he croaked sadly.
“You’re Scotty. That’s right, isn’t it?”
The sim’s face warmed. His smile was fractured and brief. Then something like worry creased his features. He took my hands in his, another thing Scotty often did while trying to communicate, to overcome the barriers between us.
We were passing through Hopi then. The city was on fire. There were bodies in the streets. The blasé attitude of the newscast from Earth was beginning to rile me. They didn’t car
e. They never would as long as they kept reaping rich rewards and living in style back on the Mother Planet. People were dying on Bellepheron and they were only concerned with the entertainment news.
For the next few minutes, Scotty and I struggled to understand one another without much success. I knew it was Scotty. I knew it in my heart. But the death of Lemuel Gurnsback was deeply troubling to me and wrong. Scotty wasn’t a killer. If he felt he had reason he might have roughed the guy up a bit, but he wouldn’t have smashed his skull in with a hammer. Gurnsback was unarmed. No one on Bellepheron carried weapons, not even the police. After all, we were members of a ‘Civil Society’.
An infection in new simulacra made sense. Their lab-grown brains were being attacked and a sort of mania was affecting them, a terrible violent rage directed against those they should have trusted. It happened in living human beings, I knew. It was called a “pathological breakdown” or a “violent dissociative behavior pattern”. When human beings were diagnosed with such a malady they were terminated with mercy and kindness, always with kindness.
The decline of violence in the society directly reflected the success of this campaign to terminate mental illness. It wasn’t passed down from generation to generation anymore. It was eradicated on sight. But now the sims were sick. They were hurting people. Things weren’t so nice anymore.
Bordertown was dark. I couldn’t see much. Now and then there was a flicker of light in a storefront or a home, weapons fire perhaps.
We left that place behind and kept moving, heading for the end of the line. We drove deep into the desert. Finally, the Expressway ended at the desert rim. The car ground softly to a halt. The door locks popped and Scotty simply got out and began walking. He left me.
I could have hiked back. It would have taken hours in the darkness and I had no shoes. People were dying back there. It didn’t seem wise to walk a long way and maybe have my head bashed in like poor old Gurnsback.
So I followed Scotty, struggling to wade through the deep drifts of sand and keep up with his long strides. He seemed to know where he was going. He was determined to get there, wherever that might be.
Eventually we came to a hollow, a little valley in the deep desert. There were lights burning and low huts clustered together around a spring. There were people moving around. I was so glad to see them. They looked up at our approach, apparently as baffled and exhausted as I was.
Dear old Ida Gould from the flea market hurried out of the group and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. She was still wearing the dirty apron.
Scotty stopped moving. He watched us as if from a great distance, removed and lonely.
Ida hustled me toward the miserable knot of human beings. She said, “We’re safe here, Anna. We’re safe until it’s over.”
“What is it?” I asked pleadingly. “What’s happening to us?”
She took my hand in hers. “It’s because of the Algonquin plant. They were experimenting with the sims, trying to find a way around the mental deficiencies. They used the brains of the recently dead rather than lab-grown ones in new sims.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “That’s the source of the outbreak?”
“No,” she corrected me at once. “That’s why we’re safe. It worked for the most part. The sims they produced are smarter. They have at least some of the memories of the dead. They knew it was coming. The infection is nearly universal. It started on Earth, probably in the basic chemical organelles they ship out for the blastocyst fermentation process. This is going to be happening everywhere soon. Maybe it’s already started.”
I didn’t get it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I gazed at Scotty and he looked away. “Is he from the Algonquin River Plant?”
She nodded. “I’m sure he is. He showed up a couple of days before you did and started hanging around, like he was waiting for something, you maybe. Then he fell asleep and I couldn’t wake him. He’s so new. Have you ever seen one so new?”
I shook my head. “What do the sims from the Algonquin plant have to do with it? That one murdered a police detective, Lem Gurnsback. That thing… if it’s not infected, it’s as violent as the bad ones. It dragged me out of my house. The bruises on my wrists…”
Ida squeezed my hand. “No. You really don’t understand. Gurnsback was a bad man. He was sent from Earth to shut down the Algonquin River program. He was supposed to destroy the sims. He was ordered to eliminate the staff at Algonquin too. He did all that but some of the sims got away. He was tracking them down one by one. He must have been tracking yours… your husband.”
I was at a loss. “But why? How do you know all this?”
“Gurnsback told me some of it, while he was cutting me up, trying to get information out of me about the escaped sim.” She undid her top blouse button. She opened her shirt and showed me her lacerated chest. Her formerly white bra was colored brown and black with dried, clotted blood.
“That’s awful,” I said, pressing my hand to my chest in unconscious empathy. “How could anyone do such a thing?”
She shook her head. “People can and will do anything, given the right motivation. I think some of the recently dead worked at Algonquin and were involved in covering up the contamination. Their brains wound up in the experimental sims. Gurnsback had to eliminate them, to erase any possibility that the information would leak. He was cruel, ruthless, which is probably why they sent him.”
“You don’t have to talk about this,” I said, sensing her angst and maybe a bit of what was coming.
“But I want to,” she offered sadly. “I’m afraid he got the best of me. I told him about you. I told him the sim left right after you did, that it just up and walked away. The sonofabitch knew which mind was in which sim and he understood they’d try to go home. He put two and two together. I’m sorry.”
I patted her shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m glad you did. You saved yourself. How can that thing be my husband?”
She pointed to a GE chassis nearby that was fidgeting and watching the crowd. “That’s my son. His mind is in there, maybe his soul too. I was bleeding out when he showed up. He saved me. He brought me here. They built this place for us. They call it Similon. The dead came back to save us, Anna.”
I gazed at the handsome, broken thing that was also my husband, my love and my hero. He smiled and my heart melted.
SMASH AND GRAB
by Michelle Ann King
The late-night stragglers hanging around outside the pubs on South Street were giving Johnny funny looks. Disapproving looks. As if they knew what he was doing, and they didn’t like it.
But no— he was just imagining it. Projecting. They weren’t really looking at him. Most of them were too trashed to see beyond the ends of their own noses anyway.
He was okay. He was clear. He could do anything— just leave the kid right there, on the kerb— and nobody would notice. Eyewitnesses are always unreliable. Me, Officer? No, sorry, didn’t see a thing.
He wasn’t going to do that, but it made him feel a little better to think that he could.
He yanked on the girl’s hand and forced her to pick up the pace. ’Stop dragging your feet,’ he said, ’you’ll ruin your shoes.’
Not that Johnny cared. He didn’t buy them, and he wouldn’t be the one to buy any replacements that might be needed. But it felt like the kind of thing a parent was supposed to say.
On Johnny’s own feet were chunky trainers liberated from Sports Direct in the mall. He planned on doing a lot of walking. Probably some running. And not much looking back.
They passed the McDonald’s, still blasting out light and the aroma of French fries even at this hour. Good business sense, that— you never knew when a sales opportunity might present itself.
Johnny’s right shoe was a touch too big, and it was rubbing the back of his heel. A little, regular brush of pain every time he laid his foot down. He reached out for the pain, for the sharp and sweetly exquisite sensation of it, packed it away and stored it.
; He usually preferred to take pain from others rather than suffer himself, but he wasn’t going to waste it when he did. Some of his best customers were masochists.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Shannon said.
Johnny didn’t answer. She’d got used to that, and she didn’t ask again.
The night was turning chill. Johnny let go of Shannon’s hand and pulled his coat tighter around him. It was his favourite, the one he always took with him even when he was travelling fast and light: black leather, vintage, bought for a tenner in an Oxfam shop on the Kentish Town Rd. He didn’t mind paying, in charity shops.
It had smelled of aftershave when he’d first got it— something warm and spicy he’d never been able to identify— and even after five years of his sweat and cigarettes, it still did. Maybe it was haunted.
Shannon stayed close by his side, doing an occasional half-skip to keep up. She was a fit, sturdy little thing, for all that she’d been living on chewing gum and fresh air since her mother died. Some kids were like weeds, flourishing on neglect. Maybe it ran in the family. Good job, really.
“Can we get something to eat?” she said.
“Yeah. Later.”
“When we get to Auntie Vicky’s?”
Goddamn. Had he ever mentioned Vicky’s name out loud? He didn’t think so. The kid was good.
Johnny curled his hand into a fist inside his pocket. He should have put gloves on, but he hadn’t thought about it. He wasn’t used to being the one whose secrets needed protecting.
“Yeah. Vicky will feed you.”
That was true, at least. She might dump the kid straight on social services afterwards, but maybe that would be for the best. They should have taken her straight away, as soon as Helen died. These people were supposed to be professionals, weren’t they? Surely you didn’t need any goddamn psychic power to know he wasn’t cut out to be a father. They should have seen that straight away.
“Can we have chips?” Shannon said.
“You’ll have what you’re given,” Johnny said. Snapped, to be more accurate. Shannon went quiet, put her head down and concentrated on her feet.