Witpunk

by Claude Lalumiere; Marty Halpern

  Doc Aggressive, Man of Tin #2

  Jerey Ford

  From his Fortress of Solitude deep beneath a five-and-dime store in Newark, New Jersey, Doc Aggressive, that superior intellect, whose mind, an infernal combustion engine of mechanical imagination and brand-X Dupin ratiocination, fed on an elixir of masticated wax teeth and Fizzies, man of tin, with skin the color of a tarnished dime and resilient as the can around a cylinder of baked beans, man of vast adventures in his mission to rid the world of evil with his bulging muscles and wardrobe of torn shirts and frayed trousers, his widow's peaked hairdo like a skull cap of short shorn silver broom ends, his trademark grimace as if forever caught in the act of shitting rivets, puts the call out to his matchless posse of bizarre constituents – Ham Fist, a guy with a fist that is a big Easter ham able to serve a gathering of twenty, who pounds bad guys into submission and tightens his buddies up to slices of his smoked fatty goodness; Shyster, world renowned attorney and consummate ambulance chaser, who more than once extricated Doc's legal tin ass from nasty suits like the time Aggressive got a little too so with an innocent old codger he mistook for The Grim Hasbeen, slapping the old coot silly and putting the Tin Landslide on him; Jon Creep, creepiest guy in the world, who creeps out evildoers more often than they, themselves, are able to creep out Creep; Elastic Willie, rubber appendage specialist, wrapping up bandits with encompassing hugs, whose way with the lady villains is legendary and who consults Doc on matters of the heart, breaking down the whatsoever of birds and bees for his employer and recasting the intricacies of romance in the language of Tin; Deadeye, whose expertise is shooting guns, all kinds of guns, rifles, derringers, pistols, machine guns, staple guns, and killing people at long range so that nobody has to care too much or get messy – assembling his pentacle of associates in order to sally forth to Queasy Cay, and engage in battle against the Immortal Morgoloop, an ancient evil Neanderthal with the brain of an Isaac Newton, wrestling him under a red sun with a storm of bats flying crazy, machine-gun rounds spraying, tin biceps flexing, sweat like beads of mercury falling, so as to capture the craven caveman, giving Doc an opportunity to administer a good cheek fluffing and such a pinch in the name of Justice.

  Bagged 'n' Tagged

  Eugene Byrne

  Call me stupid – I deserve it – but when Phyllis persuaded me to join what she called "the movement" I really thought she fancied me. I didn't realize how treacherous she was until it was too late. And no, we never did get to do the nasty. She saw to that.

  They came for us all in the wee hours of a Sunday – a slack day for news, and with a general election due the Thursday after. I saw some of it at the Ealing branch of Cop-U-Like. Me and a few of the others were handcuffed to the bull bars of the vandal-proof Coke machine in the reception area when that oily bastard of a Home Secretary came onscreen to say a major terrorist group had been busted, that it was a great day for Law and Order, vote for us on Thursday, thank you and goodnight.

  You'd swear The Margin were Sword of Allah, Angry Brigade, SNLA, and The Society for the Preservation of Hundred Acre Wood all mixed up. Those of us not preoccupied with irregular bowel movements managed an ironic titter.

  I knew this wasn't about due process of law as we were each hauled into a little white-tiled room with a stout chair and some sinister looking equipment in the middle. It was like a dental surgeon had set up in a public toilet, only with more blood on the walls.

  We were being tagged before we'd been tried.

  My turn: A pair of mountainous rent-a-cops strapped me into the chair while the doc lit a cigarette and explained it was best not to struggle as it hurts more that way. He was at least seventy and didn't offer a general, but to smell the Tadjik Scotch on his breath you wouldn't need one. I got a local on the back of the neck, and one on the finger.

  I'd heard that Phyllis had grassed us up. I didn't blame her; one of the guys had said they'd waved actual prison, or maybe the fruitcake tin, at her. So she sang. I'd have done the same. Wouldn't you?

  The man in white lifted away most of the nail on my left index finger. I screwed my eyes shut and tried not to yelp. I failed.

  Somewhere else, a few of the others sang a dirge about how they would overcome some day. This while a back-street Kildare on Minimum Wage was mutilating me in the name of the law.

  Phyllis had been handing out leaflets on a street corner; from the way she talked I could tell she was a hot revolutionary babe – who fancied me!

  So I went to a meeting of the Water Margin.

  Someone said the name had been dreamed up by Iron John, the nearest thing this strictly nonhierarchical organization had to a leader. Someone said you got a Water Margin on high-quality writing paper, but I didn't buy that. "IJ" was, I would guess, in his fifties, a veteran of countless environmental and anticap campaigns who had spent too much of his leisure time with his head in the pharmaceutical cupboard, so he wasn't really capable of dealing with a 16MB concept like that.

  There were about thirty of us scattered around London; punks, phreaks, tree-huggers, Earth mammas, elves, fairies, ravers, sociopaths, crusties, dolphin-fanciers, and at least twenty-eight different flavors of anarchist. And me. Each wanted something a little different from the next, and the only way they avoided long nights of futile ideological blether was to focus on nonviolent direct action.

  That was hard enough; at the first meeting I'd been to, a damaged girl who lived in a black woolen sweater fifteen sizes too big for her suggested a kid might chase one of their flyers across a windy tube platform and fall on the electric rail. So the manifesto was changed to "relative nonviolence."

  There is nothing relative about having all your property confiscated (no big deal in my case, but IJ would surely miss his Velvet Underground vinyl) and being tagged. Babylon and market forces can't handle relativism.

  The Marginals I agreed with wanted to show people there was an alternative to junk consumerism, junk entertainment, and junk religion. That meant letting the corporations wither, creating sustainable communities, and ensuring that everyone who wants it gets some kind of real inner life, et cetera et yada and so forth. You know the deal.

  I had no problem fitting in, but, for all that, I'd never have joined if not for the commotion Phyllis was causing in my underpants. I was sort of getting by; I still got occasional supply teaching jobs, though school budgets got smaller every year. I'd also do a bit of cash work here and there, cramming some rich kid, that kind of thing. And I had a half-decent bedsit that hadn't been burgled for eighteen months. No, it was simply that I was in between girlfriends, and Phyllis came along and . . .

  "This will hurt," snarled the smaller of the two goons, his nose 2mm from mine.

  At the back of the chair was the gizmo that sticks the chip in. It was just as well. If the drunken doctor had been using his hands, I'd be paralyzed or dead.

  For a nanosecond, the pain was intense. The agony started in my back, went into my head, then shot on down through the rest of me.

  Then it was gone again, before I'd had time to think about screaming.

  Now the doc (I assume he was a doctor, although he'd probably been struck off at some stage) was in front of me with a little paintbrush in one hand and, in the other, a pair of tweezers holding my fingernail. Both his hands were shaking. Agonizingly slowly, his trembling fingers brought nail and brush together to paint on the magical glop that would hold it over the hole in my neck and stop it deteriorating.

  Hacking off most of your fingernail is supposed to be humane; the chip is very sensitive to pressure to stop you trying to cut it out. So the nail gets grafted on as protection. But it doesn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that mutilation is a way of impressing the full majesty of the law on the reprobate.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention as the nail got stuck into place, and a Band-Aid got stuck on top of that.

  (One other point of information, brethren and sistern; in the old days, the state used to beat the crap out o
f dissidents, imprison them, or kill them. Nowadays, instead of guns they have tasers and bean-bag guns or those sound systems that give you a massive pain in the goolies . . . The state doesn't kill or do anything headline-grabbingly horrible anymore. They have the technology to tackle dissent "humanely." And because of that they can be loads more repressive. Okay, sorry, I'll shut up now.)

  "Next!" slurred the Finlay. In a flurry of strap-undoing and wire-disconnecting, the goons hauled me from the chair. I noticed the doc's hands were falling to pieces; he had eczema like Siberia has tree-stumps. And he wasn't wearing gloves. He had probably left a quarter of his healing hands in the root of my brain.

  I was kept with some of the others – all men – in a bare cell with a couple of buckets, one for drinking water, the other for the bog.

  We swapped notes; how much the implant hurt, what Babylon would do next, how long we'd all be sentenced for, how Amnesty International would save us. But after the first couple of hours, nobody said much. Some tried to sleep, some used various meditation techniques to chill. Some just stared at the wall. I tried to sleep as much as possible. I'd already figured that the local on my finger wasn't going to last and it'd get bloody sore. I was right.

  In two days, they fed us once. A nice old duffer came in with a big box of Tesco sandwiches. There was lots of meat and fish, but as we were starving we just threw the animalstuff away. The butties were two or three days past sell-by. They were supposed to go to the roofless, the shanties, and other first quadranters – a charity handout. I guess the manager of this branch of Cops R Us had told the Sally Army he didn't have the budget to feed us.

  A.M. on day three, we got sentenced. Our brief was a brisk young woman done up in pearls and navy pinstripe who said: "plead guilty or spend ten years on remand," i.e. in prison. Plead guilty, she said, and you'll be free in a few months.

  The courtroom was empty apart from a few rent-a-cops and suits. The press and public galleries were empty. Since Babylon was marketing the bust as a major victory against terrorism and declining family values, they invoked state security to keep media, friends, and relatives away. My eloquent defense would impress no one. I pleaded guilty.

  "Brian Harper," said His Honor consulting the terminal on the bench, "the grave offences to which you have pleaded guilty are in no way mitigated by the misguided, and if I may say so, intellectually sloppy ideology to which you and your co-defendants adhere. However, in view of your comparative maturity – you are . . . let me see . . . twenty-eight years old – and your hitherto clean record, I am prepared to be lenient in the hope that when you have served out your sentence, you can make something of yourself . . ."

  This was good.

  "I sentence you to three months reparative custody for criminal damage, three months reparative custody for conspiracy to commit criminal damage, and twelve months for being an accessory to trespass in an electronic communications system. The sentences will run consecutively."

  Eighteen months! A year and a half! Aaaarrgh!

  "The crimes were all committed against Southern Cable PLC," continued His Judgeship. "They will take custody of all defendants in this case . . ."

  This might be good. Often the victims don't want their taggies, so they get privatized. You could end up breaking rocks, breaking the necks of chickens, assembling hardware . . . Working for a cable TV company didn't sound too dirty or dangerous. And we'd all be together.

  In the past, Marginals had tied themselves to trees on development sites, thrown paint at objectionable edifices, graffed slogans on likely looking walls, injected sloe juice into supermarket TV dinners, and run around gridlocks stuffing Christmas pudding up the exhausts of petrol-driven cars.

  Babylon knew this but didn't care. Babylon also knew of the Margin's greatest coup. A while before I joined they'd put Satan – Iron John's creation – into the stock system of Homeworld. Satan tumbled all the swipe numbers to one, the number for a gift-set of leatherex-bound novels by Jeffrey Archer – exactly the thing Mrs. Middle England would put in her front room to convince visitors she was a person of taste.

  Homeworld had a just-in-time setup. Satan went live at 2:30 P.M. on a Sunday, and all over the country, stores – and the Homeworld Virtual Store – reordered nothing but these books from the merchandising bot, which automatically showed the supplier a legally binding contract. The Late Lord Archer's estate ended up a lot richer, and a printer somewhere ended up very rich indeed.

  The Marginals never got busted for that. Homeworld was not a contributor to the funds of either of our two interchangeable ruling parties.

  We were bagged and tagged for the Cable job. A couple of the zits had come up with the plan; wire is very vulnerable to elves and goblins and long-leggedy beasties. So they rigged up a van with a generator and all their magic boxes. My role was minimal – touring scrap yards picking up lengths of old coax cable. When everything was ready, they cut into all five of their porn channels at 3 A.M. with just a superimposed caption: "YOU'LL GO BLIND." The van injected from waste ground a mile from the borders of the nearest gated municipality while the rest of us watched at IJ's house.

  It worked.

  My trial lasted four minutes. Some of the others took longer to protest at what a travesty it was, but most pleaded guilty. Only a few were missing from the pen when they gave us some more vintage sandwiches and some bottled water and prodded us onto a bus.

  We met the women on the bus. There was a lot of hugging and chatter and a sort of feeling of relief.

  It amounted to: nobody was going to prison (excellent), we were going somewhere together (good), we were going to be given to a cable company (probably good), and they were all going to the West Country (there are worse places).

  Mo sat down next to me, managing a smile. Mo was about my age, five and a bit feet tall with short, red hair and several layers of unkempt clothing.

  "How're you doing?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "How's your finger?"

  "Fine. You can control physical pain easy enough. It's all this shit that's hard to deal with."

  "Could be worse," I said fatuously.

  The bus set off. Mo and I chatted. She, too, got eighteen months as she'd had little to do with the cable scam. Mo was no fundie, but distrusted technology. Man-stuff, she called it. Computers work by machine code, she said. Binary can only handle on or off, right or wrong, yes or no. Same thing with what they put up on screen; the only way to deal with a game-nasty or virtual enemy was to kill it. No room to be kind to it, no way to change it; machine code has no maybes, said Mo.

  I wanted to tell her she was way behind the times, but I guessed it would be pointless. She'd only have argued that no amount of logical relativism in programming and no amount of games where you needed empathizing or negotiation skills changed the basic facts.

  Instead I said, "Poor Phyllis," noticing she wasn't on the bus.

  "Bitch," said Mo.

  "Oh come on," I said, surprised. "They'd have given her a terrible time. You can't blame her for breaking under pressure."

  Mo looked at me like slantwise. "Haven't you heard?"

  "Heard what?"

  "Phyllis was a plant. She works for Safe 'n' Sound Security. She was an infiltrator, a mole. Her job was to give us away in time for the election."

  "Oh," I said, then said nothing for quite a while.

  "Once we could freak around with the wire," Mo went on, "what were we going to do? Broadcast programs about whales and dolphins? Run meditation workshops? Tell people the government were liars? We'd not decided. We tried to cast a spell without visualizing the result."

  Just beyond Chiswick, I realized I fancied Mo. It was no big deal; I used to fall in love at least twice a week (as I was only too painfully aware). Every time I felt it would be different.

  This time I felt it would be different. Mo had strength and sense and, with all that witchstuff, she had an aura of serenity and mystery. I closed my eyes and in rushed this weird idea of her and me havi
ng babies. And I liked that.

  This was very odd. At the time, I simply put it down to the stresses of events.

  So I told her what I'd been thinking. It was clumsy, but there was no time for the usual etiquette. Besides, I'd tried this ploy before. ("Hi, my name's Brian and I've chosen you to have my babies.") Sometimes they hit me, or whistled up fifteen stone of musclebound drongo boyfriend. Usually they just laughed and ignored me.

  Mo put her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, and we said nothing.

  An hour later the bus was still bowling along the guide lane when a guy at the front, a tall, nervy bloke with a beard, stood up and speeched.

  "Okay folks, listen up. My name is Daniel Organ, and I'm your probation officer. I'm not supposed to do this, but it's only fair to let you know what's going to happen . . ."