Bedlam

by Christopher Brookmyre

  BY CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE

  Quite Ugly One Morning

  Country of the Blind

  Not the End of the World

  One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

  Boiling a Frog

  A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

  The Sacred Art of Stealing

  Be My Enemy

  All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

  A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil

  Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks

  A Snowball in Hell

  Pandaemonium

  Bedlam

  BY CHRIS BROOKMYRE

  Where the Bodies are Buried

  When the Devil Drives

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-405-51596-2

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public

  domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Brookmyre

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Jack

  Life is a whim of several billion

  cells to be you for a while.

  Groucho Marx

  Contents

  By Christopher Brookmyre

  Copyright

  Loading … File 1 of 3

  Prologue

  Work–life Balance

  Baby’s First Ray-gun

  Warped

  Research and Development

  Once More with Feeling

  Digital Rights Management

  Higher Powers

  Cloudburst

  Playing with Yourself

  Friendly Fire

  Five Thousand Ways to Die

  Loading … File 2 of 3

  Client to Server: Keep Alive

  Foreign Lands

  Trojan Detected

  Suicide is Painless

  Trespasses

  Circling the Drain

  Escort Mission

  We Bought It to Help with Your Homework

  Et in Arcadia Ego …

  Other People

  Build Time

  Computer Space

  Epic Holiday

  Quarantine

  The Sea-bars

  Wanted Level

  A Place You’ve Never Been

  Loading … File 3 of 3

  Closer

  The World You Love

  Single Player

  Double Agent

  The Endgame

  Some Corner of a Foreign Field

  Liberator

  The Captain

  Mission Accomplished

  The Eye of the Bulletstorm

  Final Boss

  Just a Little Prick

  Game Over

  Read-only Memory

  Godmode

  The Whip Hand

  Pwnage

  Self-reflection

  Final Reward

  About the Author

  Trademark Information

  Loading …

  File 1 of 3

  Prologue

  Game Face

  This is not the end of the world, Ross told himself.

  He closed his eyes as a low hum began to sound around him, heralding the commencement of the scan. The effect was more white-out than black-out, the reflective tiles filling the room with greater light than the fine membranes of his eyelids could possibly block.

  He should look upon all of it as a new start; several new starts, in fact. Yes: multiple, simultaneous, unforeseen, unwanted and utterly unappealing new beginnings. Welcome to your future.

  As he lay on the slab he conducted a quick audit of all the things that had gone wrong in the couple of hours since he’d stepped off his morning bus into a squall of Scottish rain and a lungful of diesel fumes on his way to work. He concluded that it wasn’t a brain scan he needed: it was a brain transplant. Nonetheless, as the scan-heads zipped and buzzed above him, for the briefest moment he enjoyed a sense of his mind being completely empty, an awareness of a fleeting disconnection from his thoughts, as though they were a vinyl record from which the needle had been temporarily raised.

  ‘Hey Solderburn, are we clear?’ he asked, keeping his eyes closed just in case.

  There was no reply. Then he recalled the capricious ruler of the Research and Development Lab telling him to bang on the door if there was a problem, so he deduced there was no internal monitoring.

  He opened his eyes and sat up. It was only a moment after he had done so that he realised the tracks and scan-heads were no longer there. He did a double-take, wondering if the whole framework had been automatically withdrawn into some hidden wall-recess: it was the kind of pointless feature Solderburn was known to spend weeks implementing, even though it was of no intrinsic value.

  There was still no word from outside. Solderburn probably had a lot of switches to flip, so Ross was patient, and as he didn’t have a watch on, he only had a rough idea how long he’d been sitting there. However, by the time the big hand on his mental clock had ticked from ‘reasonable delay’ through ‘mild discourtesy’ into ‘utterly taking the piss’, he’d decided it was time to remind the chief engineer that his latest configuration included a human component.

  The bastard had better not have sloped off outdoors to have a fag. Seriously, was there any greater incentive to stop smoking than having to do it in the doorway to this dump, looking out at the rest of the shitty Seventies industrial estate surrounding it?

  Ross got to his feet and extended a fist, but before he could deliver the first of his intended thumps, the door opened, though not the way he was expecting. Instead of swinging on its hinge, the entire thing withdrew outwards by a couple of inches, then slid laterally out of sight with the softest hiss of servos.

  WTF?

  Beyond it lay not the familiar chaos of the R&D lab, but merely a grey wall and the grungy dimness of a damp-smelling corridor.

  So Solderburn was taking the piss, but not in the way Ross had previously believed. This was the kind of prank that explained why the guy had ended up working here in Stirling, rather than winning a Nobel Prize. He must have slid some kind of false wall into place outside the scanning room. Ross walked forward, stepping lightly because he suspected Solderburn’s practical joke had some way to go before it reached the pay-off stage.

  He looked left and right along the passageway.

  All right, so maybe it was time to revise the practical joke hypothesis.

  There was a dead end to the left, where the way was blocked by three huge pipes that emerged from the ceiling and descended through a floor constructed of metal grilles on top of concrete, into which sluice channels were etched in parallel. There was a regulator dial on the right-most tube, sitting above a wheel for controlling the flow. A sign next to it warned: ‘DO NOT MESS WITH VALVE’.

  It was a redundant warning in Ross’s case: he wasn’t going near it. Even from a few yards away, he could feel the vibration of flow in the pipes, indicating that enormous volumes of fluid must be passing through the vessels. It sounded like enough to power a small hydroelectric station. Even Solderburn couldn’t fake up something like that.

  In the other direction, the corridor went on at least twice the length of the lab, condensation beading its walls. He could hear non-syncopated pounding, its low echo sugge
sting something powerful and resonant that was being dampened by thick walls. This thought prompted him to glance at the ceiling, which mostly comprised live rock, occasionally masked off by black panels insulating lines of thick cable.

  He began to make his way along the corridor. Light was provided by strips running horizontally along the walls, roughly two feet above head height. Ross assumed them to be inset, but if so it was a hell of a neat job. They looked like they could be peeled right off and stuck wherever they were required.

  There was another light source further ahead, a dim blue-green glow coming from behind a glass panel set high in the wall on the left.

  The corridor trembled following a particularly resonant boom from somewhere above. Ross could feel the metal grates rattle from it, the air disturbed by a pulse of movement. It felt warm, like the sudden gust of heat when somebody has just opened an oven door. There was still no rhythm, no pattern to the sounds, and yet Ross found something about them familiar.

  As he approached the panel, he could see a play of coloured light behind the glass, constant but fluid, as though there might be a team of welders on the other side of it. Please, he thought, let there be a team of welders on the other side: hairy-arsed welders with bottles of Irn-Bru and Monday-morning hangovers, toting oxyacetylene torches and forehead-slappingly obvious explanations for what was going on. Perhaps he had ended up at one of the factories on the estate, somehow?

  The panel was high, so Ross had to stand close and stretch to get a look through the glass. As soon as he did, he caught a glimpse of someone on the other side and promptly threw himself back down low, out of sight.

  It wasn’t a welder; or if it was, it was one who had utterly lost it at some point and started grafting stuff to his own face.

  In his startlement and panicked attempt to hide, Ross tumbled backwards to the deck, a collapse that felt less painful but sounded altogether more clangingly metallic than he was expecting. If the hideous creature behind the wall hadn’t seen him as he peered through the glass a moment ago, then he had surely heard him now.

  He had to get moving, and hope there was more than one way out of this corridor. It might be prejudiced to assume that the man he had seen meant him any harm purely on the basis of his unfortunate appearance, but it was difficult to imagine anybody with a penchant for soldering things to his coupon being an entirely calm and balanced individual. Besides, Ross’s alarm hadn’t been inspired purely by the fact that the guy would have a bastard of a time getting his face through airport security; it was the look Ross had briefly glimpsed in that nightmarish visage’s eyes: wild, frantic, unhinged and, most crucially, searching.

  It was as he uncrumpled himself from a heap on the floor that he discovered any attempt at flight was futile, and for a reason far worse than that this mutilated horror might already have cut off his escape. His eye was drawn, for the first time since emerging from his cell, to his own person rather than his surroundings, and a glance at his limbs showed them no longer to be clad in what he remembered pulling on that morning. Gone were the soft-leather shoes, moleskin jeans and charcoal shirt, replaced by a one-piece ensemble of metal, glass and bare skin, all three surfaces scarred by scorch-marks and gouges.

  He looked in terrified disgust at his forearm, where two light-pulsing cables were visible on the surface, feeding into his wrist at one end and plunging beneath an alloy sheath at the other. His legs were similarly metal-clad, apart from glass panels beneath which further fibre-optic wiring could be seen intermittently breaking the surface of skin that was a distressingly unhealthy pallor even for someone who had grown up in the west of Scotland.

  His chest and stomach had armour plates grafted strategically to cover certain areas whilst retaining flexibility of movement by leaving other expanses of skin untouched, and there were further transparent sections revealing enough of his interior to suggest he wouldn’t be needing a bag of chips and a can of cream soda any time soon.

  Trembling with shock and incredulity, he hauled himself upright, finding his new wardrobe to be impossibly light. His movement was free and fluid too, feeling as natural as had he still been wearing what he’d turned up to work in.

  Was it some kind of illusion, then?

  No. Of course. He had fallen asleep during the scan. It was a dream.

  Except that normally the awareness of dreaming was enough to dispel it and bring him to.

  Ross looked himself up and down again. There was no swirling transition of thoughts and images bringing him to the surface, no dream-logic progress linking one bizarre moment to the next.

  He approached the glass again. He could see two vertical shafts of energy, one blue and one green, seemingly unchannelled through any vessel, but perfectly linear, independent and self-contained nonetheless. Reluctantly, he pulled his focus back from what was behind the glass to the reflecting surface itself.

  Arse cakes.

  He looked like he had faceplanted the clearance sale at Radio Shack. It was still recognisably his own features underneath there somewhere: even that little scar on his cheek from when he’d fallen off a spider-web roundabout when he was nine. He recalled what a fuss his mum had made when he needed stitches. Everything’s relative, eh Mammy?

  Another muffled boom sounded, moments before another shudder rippled the air. He could hear lesser percussions too, like it was bonfire night and he was indoors, half a mile from the display. It was hardly an enticement to proceed down the corridor, but what choice did he have?

  He strode forward on his augmented legs, surprised to discover his gait felt no different, his tread lighter than the accompanying metal-on-metal thumps suggested. There was absolutely nothing about this that wasn’t absolutely perplexing, not least the aspects that felt normal. For instance, as he followed the passageway around a bend to a T-junction leading off either side of an elevator, he was disturbed to find that he seemed instinctively to know where he was going. Was there something in all this circuitry that was doing part of his thinking for him? He wasn’t aware of it if so; though the fact that he probably wouldn’t be aware of such a process was not reassuring.

  He stepped on to the open platform of the elevator and pressed his palm to the activation panel. A light traced around his atrophied fingers at the speed of an EKG and the platform began to rise.

  He looked again at the leathery grey of his hand. It gave a new meaning to the term dead skin. He thought of all the times Carol had ticked him off for biting his nails, of her rubbing moisturiser on his cracks and chaps in wintertime.

  Carol. No. Not yet.

  He put her from his mind as the elevator reached the top of the shaft, where his faith in instinctively knowing where he was going was put to the test by his arriving somewhere he was dangerously conspicuous. No narrow passageway this time: he had reached some kind of muster point or staging area, and was rising up into the centre of it like it was his turn on Camberwick Green.

  He got there just in time to see a group of figures – each of them similarly dressed by the Motorola menswear department – march out through a wide doorway. They moved briskly and with purpose, two halves of the automatic door closing diagonally behind them as the elevator platform came to a stop, flush with the floor.

  The booms were louder here. The smaller ones sounded like muffled explosions somewhere beyond the walls, but the big ones seemed to pulse through the very fabric of whatever this place was. He could tell when one was coming, as though the entire structure was breathing in just before it; could sense something surge through all those pipes lining the walls. It was like being inside a nose that was about to sneeze.

  He was absolutely sure of which way to head next, but it wasn’t to do with any weird instinct or control by some exterior force. It was simply a matter of having observed in which direction the platoon of zombie-troopers had shipped out and of proceeding in precisely the opposite.

  They’d had their backs to him so he couldn’t get a clear view of what they were all carrying, bu
t the objects had been metal and cylindrical, and he considered it unlikely they were some kind of cyborg brass section that had just been given its cue to hit the stage. Given how little sense everything else was making right then, it was always possible that the latter was the case and they were about to strike up ‘In the Mood’, but Ross strongly suspected that the only thing they were in the mood for was shooting anybody who got in their way.

  He proceeded towards his intended exit at what he realised was an incongruously girly trot: hastened by his eagerness to get away but slowed short of a run in case it should be conspicuous that he was making a break for it. His head spun with awful possibilities, trying to piece together what could have happened. It had to have been the scan, he deduced. Whether intentionally or not, it had left him in a state of suspended animation and his body had been stored until the advent of the technology that currently adorned and possibly controlled him.

  Neurosphere. Those amoral corporate sociopaths. This was their doing. There was probably a clause in his employment contract that covered this shit, and as he’d never bothered to read the pages and pages of legalese, he’d had no real idea what he was signing. Now he could be working for them forever, part of a manufactured army. But in that case, why hadn’t they erased or at least restrained his memory? Why was he not a compliant drone like the others he’d seen? Perhaps something had gone wrong with the process and he was the lucky one – retaining his memory and his sense of self and thus able to testify to Neurosphere’s monstrous crime. Or perhaps he was the really unlucky one, trapped in this condition but not anaesthetised by merciful oblivion, and unlike the others he’d be conscious of every horror he was about to witness, or even effect.

  He had no idea what year it was, or even what century. Chances were everyone he ever knew was gone. There might be nothing in the world he would recognise.

  The big doorway opened obligingly as he approached, its two halves sliding diagonally apart to reveal another corridor, brighter than he’d seen before. Light appeared to be flashing and shimmering beyond a curve up ahead, and with nobody to observe him, he ran towards it.