Toxicity

by Andy Remic

  In total, Randy was a fucking mess.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, because he had to stare, he could not close his eyes. Ironic, isn’t it, that now I don’t want to fucking look at myself and yet am forced to do so, constantly. In every puddle of water, every plate glass window, every piece of polished silverware, every passing mirror. And all for what? All so Jenny and her ECO scum friends could blow up another fucking factory and save the fucking planet. Oh, well, my heart bleeds for them, and their impending pain. But not much.

  I have suffered, and they will suffer. Jenny will suffer. She will tell me everything. Everything I need to know. And then I will continue, I will torture her until there’s nothing left. For she has taken my face away. She has created a monster. And I’d like to repay her the fucking favour...

  Randy smiled, but it hurt him too much. So he satisfied himself with imagining what he would do to Jenny, and the other captured members of Impurity5. He imagined their pain, with the pleasure of knowing it would soon become reality.

  She’s going to sing for me, he thought.

  Sing like a pop star.

  ~ * ~

  JENNY XI FLOATED on waves of pleasure. Not sexual ecstasy, no, for that would be too intense; that would have been an overloading of joy; no. This was a gentle lulling, like a babe being smothered by love in a mother’s arms; like a half-sleep of post-hedonistic satisfaction; like soft warm bed covers after total exhaustion. Jenny floated, and her fingers and toes tingled, and everything in the world was good and it was right.

  Eventually, she awoke. Sunlight beamed bright behind gauze curtains, which rippled gently in a summer breeze. She climbed from the bed wearing nothing but soft, silk pyjamas. In bare feet, she padded across a wooden floor, pushed aside the gauze, and stared out into paradise. A turquoise ocean lapped against white sand beaches that curved off around a distant archipelago. White foam breakers eased up the beach, and palm trees stood, scattered in random phalanxes, their fronds waving and dipping. Jenny breathed deep the smell of the ocean, and she could smell salt, and the sea, and it was pure, and natural, and perfect.

  Jenny sighed, at peace at last. It had been a long, hard fight. It had taken decades to clean the evil from Amaranth. But her fight, and the fight of her brothers and sisters in the Impurity Movement, had been strong, from heart and soul; and they had been the victors.

  Jenny looked down at her wrinkled hands, and welcomed old age. It was no great loss to her, for she had achieved her life’s ambition - to rid Amaranth of the Greenstar Company, to cast out the cancer which had infested the planet for decades, and to restore her world, her family’s world, to its former glory. The clean-up operations had been like nothing before ever seen; and the whole of Manna, hell, the whole of the Quad-Galaxy had got involved, such was the uproar at the scale of deviation carried out by Greenstar Company...

  And now.

  Now.

  Amaranth was returned to its former glory. Through their acts of violence, Jenny and her comrades had brought about a better world, a cleaner world, a world free of pollution and filth and depravity and inhumanity.

  “Save our world,” her father had said, as they stood on the hilltop.

  And she had.

  ~ * ~

  JENNY AWOKE, DISORIENTATED and happy, knowing she had done the right thing. Amaranth was pure again. Amaranth was whole again. No longer the dumping ground for a thousand human and alien civilisations; no. They had thrown off the shackles of oppression, stood together and fought for freedom and justice and purity They had saved the world.

  Her eyes flicked open.

  Gradually, as if awakening from a drunken stupor, the pleasure and happiness fizzled and faded away, to be replaced by a gradual awareness of reality and an internal pounding of body, of flesh. Like she’d done ten rounds in a boxing ring. Twenty, even.

  No, she thought to herself, and tears welled in her eyes. No! Because the dream had seemed so real, so true; so solid she could reach out and touch it. It had been a dream not just of belief, but of certainty. A vision of the future. Savagely, Jenny pushed back her tears and focused and sat up.

  She frowned.

  Her body assailed her with aches and a dull, throbbing agony.

  She was seated on a bench like a slab of obsidian, almost tomb-like in its structure. She turned, allowing her legs to swing down. The room was reasonably large, and all four walls were fashioned from glass. With a blink, Jenny realised she was under the sea. Light came from far above, and the water shimmered a deep blue, sometimes green. It was mostly murky, but occasionally light broke through. Jenny had a sudden sense, an impression, of massive pressure, the weight of an ocean pressing down on her. She shivered. If one of those glass walls gave way, Jenny would be crushed quicker than the time it took to scream.

  Jenny eased herself down from the slab, and looked around, frowning. If this was a prison cell, it was the oddest she’d ever encountered. In one corner there was a very narrow black door; she padded over to it, looking down, realising she was dressed in a single white cotton slip and soft white cotton slippers. Like a patient. Odd. She crossed to the door and touched it, then recoiled with a yelp, leaving a patch of skin. The alloy, whatever it was, was way, way below freezing. Jenny gave an involuntary shiver, noting there was no door handle, then she moved back to the centre of the chamber. She stopped, and calmed her breathing, and listened.

  Silence. But more, deeper than silence, a sense of great weight and great mass. And a kind of deep, bass booming. Like the ocean was talking to her in her glass cube.

  She moved to one of the glass walls and touched it. It was quite obviously massively thick in order to combat the incredible pressures of the ocean. Just then, a shaft of sunlight broke from far above and Jenny realised how deep she was. Light flashed through the water, sparkling, dazzling, and seemed to light her face and give her warmth and hope and promise...

  She gasped.

  “Don’t get too excited,” came a voice. Feminine, husky.

  Jenny turned and stared at a petite woman, dressed all in black, with bright blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. The woman smiled in a friendly manner, but Jenny could read her blue eyes. They were hard; harder than flint. This woman was a killer. Jenny could smell the stench of death a thousand miles away; the blood on her hands. The souls on her conscience.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are a guest of Greenstar Company.”

  “If I am a guest, then I am permitted to leave.”

  “Not... yet. Let us say you are here to help us with our enquiries.”

  “Fuck you, sweetie,” said Jenny, smiling and moving around the room, keeping an equal distance between herself and this small, blonde woman. “What’s your name, then? I’m assuming you know all about me?”

  The woman gave a narrow smile. “I am Vasta, Head of Security. And yes, we do know something of you, Jenny Xi. Some of your history. And we know a lot about your ECO terrorist exploits and your destruction of twenty-eight Greenstar facilities. We have much video evidence, and of course, Randy Zaglax has been gathering intelligence for over a year now...”

  “So that’s his name? That back-stabbing motherfucker.” Jenny’s eyes were angry now and she stopped her pacing. “Let me out of this room.”

  “You will help us with our enquiries.”

  Jenny was weighing the woman up. Even if she attacked and beat the woman, which she knew she could, there was no guarantee she could get out of the freezing door. Unless... she took her hostage. But that was supposing Greenstar Company didn’t think of her as expendable. And Jenny doubted that.

  So... what to do?

  Her immediate quandary was answered by the black door opening and a figure stepping through. Again dressed all in black, he was tall and slim and... and he had the face of a monster. A patchwork quilt of bad surgery. He strode across the chamber and stood beside the woman. He carried a pistol. Jenny felt her heart chill. Her lips compressed and she relaxed herself, despite he
r many aches and pains. She made herself ready for combat...

  “Jenny,” said the monster through mashed lips and steel teeth. His face wobbled as he spoke, as if the rough-sewn skin panels weren’t properly attached to the subframe and might go tumbling to the floor at any minute with a sodden squelch.

  Jenny opened her mouth in question, then closed it again. Distant recognition filtered into her brain, but she was tired, deathly tired, and lethargic, and aching herself from, from... from the bomb blast. The world came tumbling back, upside down and in reverse. Her mouth was suddenly dry and a million images from the previous year flickered like a black and white horror movie through her spasming mind. The stance. The tilt of the head. The angle of the arms. It was...

  “Randy?” she said, frowning, voice soft, Vasta forgotten.

  “Ahh! You recognise me! Thank god. I thought maybe I’d changed a little too much.”

  Jenny stared hard at the disfigured horror before her. Holy fuck, what’s happened to his face? screamed her brain, but of course she knew. The pressure blast from the bomb, her bomb, hell, his bomb, had quite literally ripped his face clean off.

  “You betrayed us,” said Jenny, eyes going hard.

  “You betrayed yourself!” snapped Randy, moving forward and placing both hands on the bed slab. The gun went clack. Jenny noted Randy had three fingers missing, and was holding the gun in his left hand. Which meant... he wouldn’t fire too straight.

  Jenny shifted forward, subtly, as she spoke. “We trusted you, we embraced you into our organisation, and at the last minute you turned out to be a traitor to our cause.”

  “That’s the problem, Jenny Xi, it’s your cause. You have your fucking focus set straight, thinking only of yourself. Look what your fucking bomb did to me! I didn’t deserve this, woman. You’re a fucking terrorist, there’s no other way to describe you. Yeah, we all have our causes, all have our own personal honour; but at the end of the day you pick soft fucking targets to make your point. You call yourself soldiers, but I’d like to see you go up against the real military. They’d chew you up and spit you out like the fucking detritus you are. The shit you are.”

  “We only attack installations,” hissed Jenny, eyes angry now. She moved yet closer to Randy. “Never people.”

  “Yeah, but look at the collateral damage,” snapped Randy. His eyes, one weeping more than the other, were hard and unforgiving and riddled with pain and angst. He was hurting, not just in the flesh, but deep inside. Jenny could see that, and a tiny part of her heart went out to Randy; no person deserved to have his face ripped free. But then, this was business. Business was business.

  “There are always casualties in war,” said Jenny, voice hard.

  “So I deserved this? FUCKING LOOK AT ME! YOU TOOK AWAY MY FUCKING FACE!”

  Jenny stared at the monster before her. She had never seen something so ugly and badly put together. It was as if the surgeons, knowing how incredibly handsome Randy had been before the detonation, had addressed the imbalance and made him hideous now. Behind cackling fingers they’d brought forward scalpels and scissors and knitting needles, and put together a shock-horror black-comedy B-movie horror face from a low-budget indie production. Randy looked like a bad special effect.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Jenny, softer now, stepping even closer to Randy. She could see the agony in his eyes. In his stance. The gun on the slab was pushed to one side, in his fury, in his torture, and it was a few tantalising inches away. Jenny could sense Vasta shifting, maybe realising the danger, maybe reacting to Jenny’s proximity to the gun. She only had seconds. She would have to move fast, make this count...

  Jenny surged forward, slamming a right straight to Randy’s ruined nose and scooping up the pistol in her left hand. With a cry, the mutilated dandy staggered back, one whole hand, one mangled hand coming up to his face as tears streamed down his stitched, swollen, jagged cheeks.

  Jenny pointed the gun at him. Behind Randy, Vasta had relaxed into a combat stance. She was special, Jenny could see that. She was the real danger in the room.

  “You bitch,” hissed Randy, cradling his face. A line of stitches had broken open and blood ran down his cheek. It dripped to the floor with a slow, steady rhythm.

  “I’m sorry, Randy,” said Jenny, gun pointing at his head, and then, with a subtle shift, transferring to Vasta over his shoulder. “You. Fucker. Open the door.”

  “No.”

  “One last chance. Open the door.”

  “She can’t open the door,” snapped Randy. “It’s externally controlled.”

  The gun cracked, and Randy staggered back with a bullet in his shoulder. “You hear me?” shouted Jenny. “Next bullet goes in his head, and then I start on the pretty little daddy’s girl. What do you say you simply open the door?”

  Randy, holding his shoulder, holding the bullet wound, said, “Yes. She’s ready.”

  Jenny frowned, and was suddenly struck. It was like a lightning bolt, only made from water. It came from above, hitting Jenny in the chest, flinging her to the ground, vibrating in shock. The gun clattered off across the cold stone floor. And Vasta was above her, kneeling on her arms, and Jenny was trembling with a taste of copper in her mouth and none of her limbs working properly. Her fingers were shaking and twitching uncontrollably. A smell rose to her nose and she realised she’d pissed herself.

  She stared up into Vasta’s face, and the petite blonde woman was smiling. “Perfect,” she said, and pulled back her fist.

  Then the lights went out.

  ~ * ~

  SIX

  HORACE STOPPED BY the open door and smelled the breeze. It smelled bad. It smelled of... toxicity. He gazed down the hill, the sweep of Bacillus Port City before him like some crazy electric network. Sirens howled through the rain, and the city shimmered with a low-level haze of pollution. Blue and green stroboscopic lights glittered against mist and rain and toxic clouds, and Horace’s eyes narrowed in anticipation.

  Why do I feel like I’ve been set up? A pawn in another man’s game? And if there’s something I despise, it’s being a tool when I haven’t given permission. Haven’t given the nod. Haven’t given my android seal of approval. He smiled. Most androids felt inferior to the humans that created them, but he knew he was superior in every way.

  He stepped out onto the gravel, rolling his neck and shoulders. The T5 was in his hand, a cold, dark brother. No point running now. They know I’m here. Probably knew I was here before I got here, but wanted to give enough time for me to be exterminated... then I’m just another homicide, and when they find I’m an android, I’m not even a murder, just the death of a machine, a tool, to be swept under the carpet at the Halls of Justice. Industrial accident, that’s what they’ll call it.

  Horace crunched out onto the gravel drive and waited. There were five police cars. Their sirens bounced up the long lane above the roar of engines. Horace’s nostrils twitched at the smell of a distant fire. Rubber was burning, thick and black against the darkened horizon. His keen eyes - far more keen than any merely augmented human could ever hope to possess - picked out two passengers, two Police Urban Force officers - per car. He could see their broad flat faces, some stubbled, their eyes dark and serious. Their body language suggested they were carrying long weapons, machine guns or, more probably, shotguns. Horace approved. A shotgun was a good weapon to take down an android; the wide blast to knock it from its feet, then twin or quad barrels in its mouth - and it was game over, baby. But what they didn’t know (or maybe they did, whispered a thrilling chill in his soul), and this made Horace smile for a moment, baring perfect white teeth, was that he was an Anarchy model. If they did know, they should have brought specialised capture and destroy equipment. If not...

  You could run...

  No.

  Stubborn.

  A perfectionist in search of the truth.

  Do you want to know the truth?

  I always want to know the truth.

  The first car crunch
ed to a halt on gravel twenty metres away, and Horace smiled as the T5 came up. He shot the first PUF officer through the windshield, a hard crack and the body slammed back, shards of nose protruding through the skin, tongue slack in lolling jaws. His comrade was faster, rolling from the car with a D4 shotgun in both hands, blood speckles of his friend and comrade on his cheek, a look of shock raping his features. He hadn’t expected that. Not so fast. Not so clean.