All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Why don’t you call me tonight on the telephone,’ he’d say to the unfortunate offender. ‘Invented by Alexander Graham Bell of Edinburgh. Chances are you’ll interrupt me watching television, invented by John Logie Baird, of Helensburgh, and I’ll tell you to get on your bike, invented by Kirkpatrick Macmillan of Dumfriesshire. You got pneumatic rubber tyres on that thing? Thank John Boyd Dunlop of Dreghorn. And you’ll be riding it on a road surface invented by John ‘Tar’ Macadam of Ayr. What’s that? You fell off and broke your leg? Don’t worry, we’ll fix that under general anaesthetic, pioneered by James Young Simpson of Bathgate. And no need to worry about infection, because we’ll clean the instruments with antiseptic invented by Joseph Lister of Glasgow, and we’ll be using antibiotics derived from penicillin, discovered by … Now what was that bloke’s name again?’

  He could also cite microwave ovens, adhesive stamps, cloned sheep, the decimal point, bakelite, iron bridges, logarithms, colour-photography, insulin, fingerprinting, radar, ultrasound scanners, paraffin and hollow-pipe drainage, these last two further supporting his assertion regarding the correlation between creativity and climate. At a more theoretical level, there was Colloid chemistry, geoscience, Brownian motion, chemical bonds, thermodynamics and, rather pertinently of late, James Clark ‘Daftie’ Maxwell’s equations in electromagnetism.

  But it wasn’t all worth boasting about. Admittedly you couldn’t pin McDonald’s directly on Adam Smith, but as the father of modern capitalism he was without a cast-iron alibi. Scots were further indictable over other such misbegotten creations as the Bank of England, the US Navy and motor insurance.

  There was also Captain Patrick Ferguson. In 1776 he invented a rifle that loaded via the breech rather than the muzzle, replacing the awkward and slow ramrod method, which restricted a soldier to three shots per minute and required him to fire only from an upright position. Captain Ferguson’s rifle doubled that rate of fire and allowed greater versatility of posture. Then in 1809 the Reverend Alexander Forsyth invented Percussion Powder, which rendered the damp-prone flintlock obsolete and facilitated its replacement with a weatherproof hammer action.

  After which we were all far more efficiently able to get on with killing each other.

  Ross had always considered there to be something ugly and crude about guns: in their design, their method and, in particular, their purpose. They were machines for driving projectiles into living tissue. That’s it. It was a principle that hadn’t changed since the first musket. The muzzle velocity kept increasing, the accuracy kept improving and the rate of fire just kept accelerating (Thanks, Mr Gatling. Good work, Mr Thomson), but each new gun was simply a more sophisticated way of carrying out the same crude and brutal act: driving projectiles into living tissue. And talk about one size fits all! No matter your situation, we’ve got the solution. Soldiers, need to bring down your enemy? Drive projectiles into his flesh. Policemen, need to restrain a suspect? Drive projectiles into his flesh. You there, angry, confused and alienated ghetto kid, want to avenge a minor slight and restore your status among your peers? Hey, guess what? That’s right, you’re getting it now.

  Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.

  Too fucking easy. Too fucking moronic. Too fucking final.

  Guns made killing remote, personal and dead, dead simple. To kill someone with your bare hands, or a blunt instrument, even with a knife, you’ve got to want it bad, because you’re going to have to work for it. With guns, it was literally the same effort and almost the same action as switching on a light. You didn’t have to want it that much, or for that long. You only had to want it for a moment, and then it was done – forever.

  Thus the raging wee nobodies who weren’t being paid enough attention could have their world-wrecking tantrums. Thus, ‘going postal’. Thus Hungerford. And thus the most evil act perpetrated by an individual in Scotland’s history.

  Ross’s disdain for guns went right back to the playground. They seemed needlessly unimaginative, especially in those days of make-believe.

  Piaow, piaow, piaow. That’s what he’d hear all over the place. Piaow, piaow, I got you. Naw ye never. Aye I did. Piaow, piaow.

  ‘Zloopf.’

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘Got you. That’s you frozen in my Displacement Vortex.’

  ‘Your whit?’

  ‘My Displacement Vortex. Noo you cannae move.’

  ‘Nae chance. Anyway, I shot you afore you could set it aff.’

  ‘You fired, aye, but your bullet never hit me. It got sucked into my Gravity Well.’

  ‘Your whit?’

  ‘My Gravity Well.’

  ‘Fuckin’ poof.’

  Ross would contest the kiddy gospel according to Obi-Wan Kenobi. To his mind, there was no such thing as an elegant weapon, even one that looked as cool as a lightsabre. There were only lesser degrees of ugliness. However, where ingenuity could substitute for violence, where innovation could replace physical damage, then that device could be said to have something close to grace. Even the Resin Cannon, which engulfed its target in a sticky, quick-setting gum, was a far more humane means of neutralising an armed opponent than blasting lumps out of him.

  But no government in the world cared much about being humane, and even less about grace. Everybody needed guns – more guns, bigger guns, better guns – because everybody else had them. Which would have been a better argument if it could be supported by an example, from any place, in the history of the planet, where proliferation of weapons hadn’t merely led to more deaths. Air Marshals: that was the latest. The possibility of people smuggling guns on to aeroplanes was dangerous, so let’s make damn sure there’s a gun on every aeroplane. Sheer fucking genius.

  The more guns there were, it seemed, the more guns we needed for our protection. This kept the gunmakers rich and the market for non-lethal enforcement very marginal. Deimos knew this as well as anyone. The NLW research facility had always been little more than a side-project, motivated less by conscience or altruism than by the possibility that something developed there might find an application back in the plain old lethal sector. From almost the first day Ross got there, he’d heard gloomy mutterings that the bosses were thinking of shutting it down or selling it off, the latter merely meaning it would be shut down and asset-stripped by someone else.

  He felt like he was farting into a thunderstorm. If it took little thought, even less skill and almost no effort to, ahem, ‘neutralise’ or ‘restrain’ someone by drilling them full of holes, then who wanted to take a chance on this vegetarian pussy stuff Ross was hawking? Resin Cannon? Sonic Blackjack? Automirmillo? No thanks, we’ll stick to this machine here. It drives projectiles into their flesh, see?

  The man with the gun always had the advantage, whether he was pointing it at you or merely selling it. There was no way of changing that.

  Not without a Gravity Well.

  It was a vivid testament to the role denial played in the human self-defence instinct that Lex had at any point even attempted to convince herself that Ross Fleming’s disappearance would turn out to be unrelated to the files she spirited away from his place of employment. Laughable, she’d admit, except that what she had retrieved from the server wasn’t very funny. She was glad she’d watched the video clips on her own before taking them to Maison Bla. Everybody was going to look pretty shocked when they saw them, but she thought it unlikely any of them would run from the room and blow chunks, which would have made her own initial response uncomfortably conspicuous.

  After redistributing her cold pizza around the toilet bowl, her next instinct was to check that the front door and all her windows were locked. She couldn’t believe how much danger she had unknowingly – negligently – put herself in. Her shadowy contact, this nameless ghost with his ethereal promises and unspoken air of intimidation … God, what was she thinking? She should have run screaming, gone straight to Bett. And, looking back, her being part of Bett’s team might well be the only reason she was still alive. Having seen what
he hired her to procure, it was easily conceivable that he’d have murdered her to cover his own tracks, if it wasn’t that he guessed doing so would bring a whole world of trouble down upon himself. There was also the consideration, immodest as it sounded, that nobody on Bett’s team was very easy to kill. Instead, he’d relied on her own fears and self-preservation to ensure that Bett didn’t discover her betrayal, and now that she had manufactured a reason for being able to produce the files, it looked certain he never would.

  She was waiting for them when the chopper landed, having called around to make sure Somboon and Armand were there too. If you’re going for maximum class credits on your homework assignment, might as well do the whole teacher’s pet thing and look super-eager with it. She handed print-outs of all the documentation straight to Som, who began devouring the information while she set up a data-projector in the drawing room. There was a steady stream of ‘What-the-fuck’s and ‘No-way’s, as well as muttered ejaculations in Thai.

  ‘If this shit’s for real, then this Fleming dude is gonna be immortal,’ he opined, as the away team entered and took their places around the big table.

  ‘I’d be less worried about him if that was true,’ said Mrs Fleming, pointedly.

  ‘Sure, shit, sorry,’ Som told her, before bowing his head to resume poring over the print-outs.

  ‘So what’s it all about, Alexis?’ Bett asked. (He’d been typically effusive in his praise for her achievement in recovering the data. ‘Okay,’ he’d said, when she informed him she’d managed it. That kind of warmth and encouragement went a long way.)

  ‘It’s probably best if you just watch this,’ she announced to all of them, then set the first video file to play.

  It was a high-quality digital transfer, with a date stamp (14 October last year) and clock running along the bottom, beginning at quarter past midnight. It was a fixed-camera perspective, probably a tripod, filming from an observation area behind a thick glass screen. A control panel the size of a mixing desk was just in shot below the window, dozens of dials, switches, sliders and read-outs ranked along it, and at one end sat a formidable twin-spoked lever, like a cross between the altitude control on a jet and something from a mad-scientist’s laboratory.

  The observation area was in an elevated position looking at a slight downward incline into a white-walled octagonal chamber forty or fifty feet in diameter, a silver-coloured circle in the centre of an otherwise uniformly clay-coloured floor. Towards the left-hand side of the chamber, as the camera viewed it, there stood a life-size crash-test dummy, held upright by a narrow pole angled upwards from the floor to the small of its back. The dummy was anatomically proportioned, limbs and trunk fully shaped to accurately describe bone and muscle structure, with dotted lines and colour-coding delineating different parts. In car safety research, this was to catalogue and assess specific points of injury sustained during a crash. This dummy was more detailed than Lex had seen in any Volvo commercial, however, the arms industry being even more interested in knowing precisely how much damage their products could inflict.

  At the opposite end of the chamber, there stood a low table, on which rested a pistol, a pump-action shotgun and a fully automatic rifle, magazines or cartridges stacked next to each as was appropriate.

  It wasn’t looking very good for the dummy.

  In between, there appeared to be nothing but empty space, until a closer examination of the floor revealed that the circle in the centre, approximately six feet wide, was not merely silver-coloured, but actually metallic. Nor was it flat on the ground, but described a gently indented concave beneath the surface, like the lens of a telescope.

  Into this sterile, geometric arena stepped a figure in yellow overalls, emerging from a door beneath the camera position and thus out of sight. The overalls covered him from neck to ankles, elasticated cuffs drawing the plastic material tight at the wrists and the tops of his boots. On his head he wore a pair of ear-protectors, but when he turned around he was recognisable as Ross Fleming.

  His mother breathed in sharply at the sight of him, his image projected six feet wide across the blank wall. Her anxiety was palpable but a little misplaced. This had happened six months ago, so she didn’t have to worry about the outcome. Only the aftermath.

  He walked across to the dummy and briefly examined it, checking its support and making slight adjustments to its posture.

  ‘Any last requests?’ he asked it, his voice relayed by intercom from somewhere inside the observation room. It sounded quiet and oddly dampened. The chamber looked like it ought to generate echo and reverberation, but instead it had the muffling, still-air quality of a recording studio.

  Someone laughed, close to the microphone.

  Ross made his way to the table and stood behind it. He lifted the pistol and slapped a magazine into the handle.

  ‘Okay,’ he shouted. ‘Fire her up.’

  A hand moved into shot and reached for the big lever, pushing it slowly forward against no little resistance until it had arced through about one hundred and fifty degrees. When it reached the other end, a keening sound began growing, somehow high and whiny but deep and shuddering at the same time. It seemed to come from all around rather than any discernible direction, its note getting very slowly and gradually higher over the next few seconds until it plateaued, which coincided with a sudden jarring of the image. The picture shuddered and then gently righted itself, like when Lex degaussed a monitor. Serious electromagnetic activity.

  ‘Good to go,’ said the voice in the control room.

  ‘Roger that,’ Ross acknowledged.

  He pulled the slider to ready the gun, took position to fire, with his feet apart, both hands gripping the butt, the pistol held about eighteen inches in front of his face.

  Around the table, every breath but Lex’s was held, Som staring up open-mouthed from his documents. Even Bett’s emotionless demeanour was briefly interrupted by a narrowing of the eyes normally only seen when he was in sight of an enemy.

  Ross fired the pistol, the report dull and muted, the slider automatically chambering the next round as the spent cartridge was spat from the ejection port. The shell appeared as a brief flash of metal next to Ross’s hands, then vanished from sight. By that time he had fired again. He fired repeatedly and steadily at one-second intervals until he had discharged twelve rounds. Used to her own habits, Lex had expected him to eject the mag and let it fall from the butt, but he simply placed the gun down on the wooden table.

  Everyone looked to the dummy. It had sustained no visible damage whatsoever.

  ‘What’s the invention, a gun that doesn’t shoot straight?’ asked Armand. ‘How could he miss every round? From that distance?’

  Bett’s face failed to revert to its familiar impassivity, his gaze held utterly by the screen.

  Ross picked up the shotgun and loaded half a dozen shells into its side-entry port. He pumped it, levelled it and fired. Nothing hit the dummy. He pumped and fired again, three times, four times, five, six. Still the dummy remained intact.

  ‘Your son isn’t blind, is he?’ Armand asked Mrs Fleming.

  ‘No. He’s a dead shot. When we took him to the fairground we always came home with half a dozen goldfish and a bagful of gonks.’

  Flashing a wickedly knowing grin up towards the observation screen, he dropped the shotgun and lifted the rifle. He clipped in a mag, slid the bolt, flipped off the safety, hefted it against his right shoulder and let rip.

  He sustained fire on fully automatic for several seconds; quite a volley but, Lex estimated, not enough to empty the mag. Everyone else’s eyes continued to focus on the dummy, but hers, this second time around, were watching the spent shells and, more specifically, what happened to them as they poured from the ejection port.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Armand confessed, shaking his head.

  Som giggled nervously.

  ‘Look at the disc,’ Bett said quietly, unable to keep a note of awe from his near-whispering voice.

&n
bsp; ‘The disc?’

  ‘On the floor.’

  ‘What about it? I can’t see, it’s too far.’

  ‘Okay, kill it,’ Ross shouted, up on the screen.

  The assistant’s hand returned to the mad-scientist lever and hauled it back to its original position. The image shuddered again and the keening noise died away to nothing.

  Ross walked around the table and proceeded to the silver circle in the centre of the chamber. He crouched down, bending his knees, and put a hand into the wide salver, grasping something in a balled fist. Then he lifted his hand and opened his fingers, letting bullets, shot and cartridges cascade from his palm like seashells on a beach.

  ‘Mon Dieu.’

  ‘Fuck me.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Madre mia.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  Bett said nothing, just continued to stare with unbroken concentration.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said Rebekah, into the growing, breathless silence. ‘Not possible. An illusion. Blanks. Gotta be blanks.’

  Lex smiled grimly to herself, knowing what was next.

  On the screen, Ross Fleming took position behind the table once more, picked up the rifle, unlatched the safety again and emptied the rest of the magazine. The dummy jerked and exploded in a storm of splinters, ripped to pieces by the bullets. Limbs came off, its head blew apart, and what was left was thrown back against the wall by the force of impact.

  Another assortment of expletives and ejaculations ensued.

  ‘Okay, that’s clip one,’ Lex told them.

  ‘There’s more?’ Som asked eagerly.

  ‘Just the one. Here it comes. That one was tagged “Normalpolarityvid”. This one is “Reversepolarityvid”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’