Toxicity

by Andy Remic

  Lumar stared at him, then rubbed at her forehead. It was getting too much: everything, just creeping up on her a bit at a time. She wasn’t built for this; this wasn’t her goal. To be surrounded by idiots! All the time!

  “Okay,” she said, voice a low growl. “You walk on your tippy toes. That’ll be great.”

  They drifted down silent, ghostly corridors. For Lumar, rather than the corridors adding to a sense of normality - compared with the rough-hewn rocky walls of the mines - instead, it seemed to add to her tension.

  Lumar stopped. Her nostrils twitched. Something felt wrong. Her eyes narrowed, and up ahead, from the towering stacks of raw metal, stepped a child. She was small, and huddled under the rags that served as clothing. Her hair was long and matted, and her face was simply a mass of sores and open, weeping wounds.

  “Urgh,” said Svool.

  Lumar turned, and kicked him in the balls. As Svool hit the ground and lay foetal, Lumar holstered her pistol and moved forward with hands spread out, a loving smile on her face, hoping to instil some kind of trust in the desolate little girl...

  “It’s okay,” said the child.

  “You’re not frightened?” said Lumar.

  “No. I’ve been following you. Watching you.”

  “Yes.” Lumar nodded, and smiled again. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

  “No. This is where I live. This is where we all live.”

  Svool, grunting on the ground, rolled over and tapped Lumar on the calf muscle.

  “Not now,” she snapped, then back to the girl. “What’s your name, child?”

  “I am Chorzaranalista. Welcome to my home.”

  “Is she diseased?” wheezed Svool, managing to crawl to his knees. “Ask her, ask her if she’s diseased. We don’t want to” - he stared at her disfigured face with a shudder - “catch anything.”

  Chorzaranalista smiled. “No. I am not diseased,” she said, and her great large eyes looked incredibly sad. “Come with me. I’ll show you our home. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

  She moved away, almost drifting, a tattered shawl around her shoulders. She moved like a ghost.

  Svool got to his feet, hanging on to Herbert for support. He grimaced at Lumar. “What you fucking go and do that for?”

  Lumar stared at him, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Have you no soul?” she said, then whirled about and followed the girl down the corridor of metal slabs.

  Svool stared after her, then back at Herbert. “Huh?”

  “Don’t look at me, buster. I just work here.”

  He spread his hands. “What did I do wrong? That deserved a kick in the balls?”

  Herbert looked down his rusted equine nose at Svool, then shook his head. “I thought you had an imagination?”

  “I do!”

  “Well, use it,” said Herbert, and clattered off after Lumar. Angelina sauntered over, offered her buttocks in Svool’s direction, and emitted a long dribbling shit of black oil filled with metal shavings. Then she, too, followed the disfigured little girl.

  Svool made a clucking noise, and fell in behind, trying to work out what he’d done wrong. He walked fast, and soon caught up with Angelina, but her huge swaying horse buttocks stopped him from passing in the relatively narrow confines of the corridor. He tried - unsuccessfully - to squeeze past her a few times, but always, strangely, she would sway one way or the other, and her great metal arse would whack him into the wall.

  The journey lasted perhaps half an hour, through endless corridors of metal slabs and always heading gently downwards. Eventually they emerged by the banks of the lirridium river, only here there seemed to be some kind of mesh gate, a filtration pool of some kind; and rather than the still waters they’d seen before, it was a quagmire of crap, a giant lake of almost solid effluence, detritus, junk and garbage, which here went through some kind of filtration process and then carried on, beyond the gate, beyond the mesh, as pure, unsullied, de-chunked lirridium. Or its unrefined form.

  Svool held his nose as he stumbled into the group once more, and holding his nose, he said, “By the Gods of Fuck, this surely stinks like a ten-week-dead whore after the rats have built nests inside her.”

  Chorzaranalista looked down at the ground; at her holed shoes, scuffed and battered and colourless. “This is my home,” she said.

  “You might have tidied up a bit, girl!” said Svool, looking around once more. “I mean, look at the mess!”

  Chorzaranalista shrugged. “This is where I live. This is where I was born.” Then she stared at Svool and his mouth clacked shut. She pointed, out over the gently bubbling lake of- whatever it was. Decades of filth had been filtered here, clogging back for God only knew how far inside the mountain. “I was born in there.”

  “Where?” said Svool, shading his eyes to take a closer look.

  “In there.”

  “In that?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that shit pit?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “But it’s a shit pit! How could you be born there?”

  Zoot appeared, slamming from the darkness and braking with a hiss of superheated air. He spun, seemingly agitated. “Ah!” he said. “So. You found her. The girl, I mean. She’s not human! Watch out! She’s very, er, dangerous.”

  “Thanks for the early warning,” said Lumar, pushing past the spinning PopBot. “Some defence mechanism you turned out to be!”

  Chorzaranalista grinned suddenly, and ran her hands through her tangled, matted hair. The closer Lumar got to the. child, the more she realised it wasn’t actually hair. It looked more like metal strands. Wires. Cables. Copper and iron.

  Chorzaranalista looked at Svool. “To answer your question, I was born in the tox. Of the tox.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Let me show you.”

  Chorzaranalista moved to the edge of the lake. She lifted her hands and chanted, and spoke, her words floating back to Lumar and Svool, to Zoot, Herbert and Angelina. “All life is an accident. Throughout the Quad-Gal Bubble, this has been demonstrated time and time and time again. You, Svool, are of human descent; and yet all humans evolved from a chemical soup. A soup of proteins and toxins and shit. Yes, that’s right, Svool. You were born from shit.”

  “Tush!” he said. Lumar presumed he was disagreeing.

  “And so were we,” she said, as out of the toxic waste rose what appeared to be huts, tiny igloos of waste, green and brown and putrid, a rotting organic slurry; slowly, the huts came to rest on the surface of the waste pool and Lumar, standing by the edge, knelt down. She reached forward, and her hand sank into the thick soupy substance. It wasn’t solid, and yet the children who emerged from the small huts walked across the surface as if by magic. There were about thirty of them, some male, some female, each seemingly modelled on a human child and yet with subtle differences; some had long tentacles drooping down from their faces, as if a human face had merged with an octopus. Some had teeth made of glass, or an elephant’s trunk for a nose, or ears like butterfly wings. And each one appeared to be an open, festering toxic sore, a platter of pus and disease and gangrenous, rotting matter.

  “I think we should run,” muttered Svool to Lumar.

  “Shh!”

  “Where would you run to?” said Chorzaranalista. She was smiling, and it was a friendly smile, but Svool didn’t trust anything that had more teeth than him. In fact, he didn’t trust anything with less teeth than him. He basically trusted nobody but himself.

  More toxic children - children born of the toxicity -emerged from the corridors surrounding Svool, Lumar, Zoot, Angelina and Herbert. Herbert started to issue a strange, fear-filled braying.

  And from the huge bubbling lake, yet more pods began to rise. Ten at first, then twenty, then fifty. Then more than Lumar could count. The entirety of the lake was filled with toxic huts, and from them came a flood of diseased and deformed creatures that looked like human children, but who smiled with black rubbe
r teeth, and had old pieces of car tyre welded into their skulls. Lumar and Svool saw fingers made from pencils, faces inset with shards of glass, broken bottles, old alarm clocks; bones from different creatures poking out at odd angles from their own flesh - and they knew, knew that what walked and ambled before them was an army not of human children, but of creatures, evolved beings made from the very toxic waste itself...

  The figures moved in tight, non-aggressive but threatening them with their very natures. And Svool, Lumar, Herbert and Angelina shuffled backwards in a rapidly shrinking circle. In an act of great heroism, Zoot slammed off high into the air and disappeared amongst the columns and corridors of slab metal.

  “That’s right!” screamed Svool suddenly, waving his fist. “You run away, you bloody PopBot coward! You’re fired! You hear me? Bloody fired!”

  “Shut up,” said Lumar through clenched teeth. She held her pistol, but held it low, pointing at the ground. After all, how many could she shoot before they overwhelmed her? Before they put out her eyes, bit off her cheeks and ate her brains?

  Suddenly, the advance seemed to bubble to a halt. There were thousands of them. Thousands of the children of the slime.

  Chorzaranalista smiled as she moved close to Lumar. So close, they could have kissed.

  “We have seen you, Lumar. And you, Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV. We have seen you in our dreams. We are the psi-children of the Waste. We know your every thought and feeling, every dream and emotion and memory. We have seen you. We have dreamed you. You have been in our prayers.”

  “You want us to do something?” said Lumar.

  “We need your help.”

  “To do what?” whispered Svool, face filled with fear.

  “We want the Greenstar Factory Hub. We’re going to drag it all the way down into our toxic world...”

  ~ * ~

  FOURTEEN

  JENNY XI - NAKED, battered, torn, wounded, exhausted, frightened - crawled for hours, and hours, and hours. The tubes were narrow and uncomfortable and sharp, and kept nipping at her flesh, slicing her here, cutting her there, until she screamed her frustration at their constant biting and fell onto her arms, onto her stolen pistol, and slept.

  ~ * ~

  RANDY CRAWLED, BITTERNESS and hate in his mind. But that was not the only thing.

  You’re slacking, said Renazzi Lode, the Greenstar Director. He had her with him. In his head. She could see what he saw, hear what he heard, feel what he felt. It was a total mindfuck. An mRape, they called it in the barracks. When he’d been a soldier. Before he became a spy. Before he became the Governor of Internal Affairs. Back then, it had been a simpler time. Before he had his boss in his head.

  Yeah. Back then had been a much better time.

  What are you thinking about? came the suspicious voice of Renazzi Lode.

  Nothing.

  You sure?

  Oh, yes.

  Shit. Great. Bastard. Bitch! Just what he needed. It was one thing to go on a terrible mission; another to go on a terrible mission with your throat half-ripped out. But to have your boss in your head as you did it? It was the ultimate in managerial observation tools, and to be fair to Renazzi Lode, it was used in many a “profession” where a boss might want to keep a very close eye on an employee. LET US FUCK WITH YOUR EMPLOYEES, went the marketing slogan for iSPY, the “spying solution for all managerial needs.” LET’S WATCH THEM TOGETHER! LET’S SEE WHAT THEY GET UP TO! LET’S CHECK THEY DO THEIR JOB PROPERLY! LET’S REMOVE THEIR MOTIVATION, CREATIVITY, AND INDIVIDUALITY AND SHOW THEM THE LACK OF RESPECT THEY DESERVE. THE FUCKERS.

  Randy had added that last bit himself.

  Randy had a friend who’d been a teacher. Damn good at his job, teaching at the New Space Academy in London, Earth. The kids loved him, and he loved his job. And one day some engineers had arrived, just as he was teaching Astro Macbeth, and installed video surveillance equipment in his classroom, much to the amusement of his pupils - until he pointed out to them that they wouldn’t be able to get up to any mischief either.

  After the lesson, he visited the Head. This was how the conversation went:

  “What’s with the video surveillance equipment?”

  “That would be for your own protection.”

  “How so?”

  “In case anything happens in the classroom.”

  “Such as?”

  “A pupil attacking you.” Mr Bob, for ‘twas his name, looked down at himself. He was six foot five inches, and used to play quarter back for the London Olympic Stags.

  “I’ve never been attacked.”

  “You might.”

  “What you mean to say is, ‘it’s there to protect the kids.’ Go on. What have I done that you don’t trust me any longer?”

  “Nothing. It’s just a surveillance measure.”

  “But I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  It was actually a valid question, and Mr Bob had to search inside himself for a long, long time to find the answer. “It’s about freedom,” he said. “It’s about trust. It’s about professionalism. It’s about stress. It’s about permission.” He shrugged. “You’ve read Orwell, right?”

  “Wasn’t he that corrupt politician?”

  “No. Look, I just want it noted that I don’t like it, okay?”

  “Your comments have been duly registered, Mr Bob.”

  Mr Bob left, muttering, and spent the next month being watched 24/7. And he proved that he was indeed trustworthy, and professional, and honourable, and that his lessons were great fun and his relationship with the kids provided for lots of learning. But iSPY had just developed their new managerial monitoring system, the FU-ckU/ vl.2. Mr Bob had it installed in his head. And for two weeks, all day, every day, Mr Bob had his boss in his head with him during every single lesson, offering a constant stream of advice, tweaking his performance and offering constant and permanent happy appraisal! It was a manager’s wet dream. And better than reality TV.

  After two weeks, Mr Bob walked in the Head’s office, fired up a set of petrol hedge-clippers on the third pull of the starter-cord, and, amidst accelerating shouts of panic and alarm, proceeded to trim the head’s hair. From the neck up.

  Randy had visited him in the clink. “They pushed me too far,” moaned Mr Bob, head in his hands. And Randy had made soothing noises, but now, finally, he knew how Mr Bob had felt. You don’t get the best results from fucking over your staff! You don’t get superior performance by shitting on those below you! Just... leave them alone to do their fucking jobs!

  And now. Oh, the irony.

  Did you hear that?

  What?

  The scream? Frustration?

  Randy narrowed his eyes, and he wanted to think to himself - I’ll show you frustration when I see you again, bitch. I’ll shove this pistol sideways up your arse! But he knew he could not. She was crawling inside his head like an electric ant, poking into every tiny place, into every orifice. He could feel her scratching across the outer surface of his brain. He could feel her raping through his memories. It hurt him. Hurt him more than the hole in his throat. Hurt him more than his lost-then-badly-rebuilt face.

  Dammit!

  Go on, up ahead. Move fast, now...

  Renazzi... please... give me some mental space! You’re sending me mad!

  Meaning? He could not believe how frosty the words were as they tumbled over themselves in his skull. And now her anger came. Now, her rage. It pounded the inside of his brain like an enraged tomcat trying to escape from inside a dustbin.

  I need you out! Out of my fucking skull! What do you hope to achieve? What do you get out of giving me this little hit more torture? Do you think I’ll thank you for it? Do you think I’ll buy you chocolates and an expensive fizzy wine?

  No. But I will give you this...

  The mental blast slammed Randy, and now it was his turn to scream. He could not lift his arms up to grasp his head, such were the confines of his entrapment, but if he could have, he would.

>   Panting, and drooling, his throat a raw agony, head pounding, face a constant burning field of napalm, Randy Zaglax struggled on through the narrow tube, struggled on, squirming and fighting his way forward in search of Jenny...

  Good boy, chuckled Renazzi.

  ~ * ~

  WHY DO YOU hate your father?

  Oh, well, that’s a long story. A complicated story.

  Well, why do you hate your brother?

  Longer. More complicated. More savage.

  And your mother?