by Kim Newman
Richard had the shivers – not just fear (though fear never went away completely), but anticipation, excitement. A thrill. Threat was there. And promise.
He glanced at his Seiko digital.
31/12/99, 09:44 44, London time.
He fingernail-pressed a rim button.
31/12/99, 17:44 45, local time.
Halfway round the world, eight hours into the future.
Like everyone who owned a gadget with a timer, he’d experimented with a temporary reset to see what might happen at 01/01/00, 00:00 01. His watch didn’t explode, but it was only a dry run. Video recorders and microwave ovens knew when they were only being tested and saved the surprise until midnight. No matter what whizz-for-atoms boys said, Richard had a sneaking suspicion contraptions could think and feel and plot and plan. And did not have the best interests of their makers at heart.
He remembered when computers filled rooms, chattering yards of needle-scratched butcher’s paper from letterbox slits. Wise old heads reckoned Britain needed no more than five of the things. A Big Thinks apiece for Oxford and Cambridge, WOTAN on top of the Post Office Tower, the General at the MoD, and REMAK at GCHQ. The rest of the country could get by with adding machines or sums done on fingers.
Now you could take a mini-HAL 9000 home from Radio Rentals. Computers sat on desks. In kids’ bedrooms. In portable phones. Disguised as tools and toys. A connective tangle of shrill modems, dedicated telephone lines, and international exchanges. Cybernets were built to answer questions. What happened when they started asking them? From his Sri Lankan veranda, Arthur C. Clarke cheerfully floated the idea that a million, million binary bits might add up to a new-born intelligence. A neural net around the world.
What vampires were to the late nineteenth century, computers were now.
Agents of sudden change. Contributors to a quickening of everything. Untameable tigers, sat meekly in the kitchen, pretending not to be ravenous. Dreaded by the hidebound, embraced by futurists. Here and not going away, no matter who grumbled or waved a crucifix.
HAROLD TAKAHAMA
With a last slurp, the chiropterid’s sucker unstuck from Taguchi’s forehead. The reformatted man slipped out of its wing-grip and hugged the big rubber ball.
The chiropterid looked around, nastily alert.
Its hunting dog proboscis pointed at Hal. Spiteful eyes fixed on him.
It had tasted his mind. That was why so much was missing.
The thing was back to finish him off.
‘What date is it?’ he asked his hand.
Basic Question # 3.
‘December 31, 1999. 17:02, Japan Standard Time.’
The last date he was sure of was 1992. The cops who ass-whupped Rodney King got off. Riots in L.A. and a quake in Mendocino. Governor Clinton was headed for either the White House or the Jail House. Michelle Pfeiffer was smokin’ as Bat-Woman in The Monk Returns. That ‘Achy Staky Heart’ song got way too much airplay.
Hal definitely didn’t remember being on Japan Standard Time.
He was in a Silicon Valley garage with scavenged kit and seed cash from his parents, cranking out killdroid templates. Gargantuabots was catching fire. Players bought schema and customised them for console combat. Leagues were forming, with rankings and tables. Ace gamers and bots had fandoms. An e-cash betting culture was springing up. Jacked street kids in Tijuana or Cluj put in the hours accumulating scar tokens and power points in prelim bouts, then sold mettled avatars to dilettante botjocks who wanted to crash the board with a sure-win mecha.
Cyberspace was a Wild West and there was gold in them thar hills. Hal was resisting pressure to go back to college. Making connections online. Imaginary robots rolled off his production line. In his mind, they were vast, clanking, oily real things… not bits and bytes and near-plagiarisms, existing only in constantly upgraded graphics.
Hal understood what all these memories and half memories were.
The chiropterid had erased his drive, but his last back-up installed automatically.
Overwritten so often it was mostly sludge. But him. Harold Takahama.
Him as he was.
He made decisions. He’d not been good at that, but was now.
Jun Zero 1999 was a million degrees cooler than Hal Takahama 1992.
That’s who he was now.
It irked him not to have as high a target-value as Taguchi or Ishikawa. Whoever they were. They didn’t matter any more. Taguchi had no ’92 back-up. His brain was a walnut.
The chiropterid still looked at Hal, fascinated by his hand.
It was an unusual feature.
‘Might I make an observation?’ chirped the bot-bit.
‘Permission granted. All input is welcome.’
‘I have advised evasion. Why are you asking questions?’
‘Information is power.’
The hand clicked and flashed. Calculating.
‘That is correct.’
The chiropterid stepped away from Taguchi, drawing in its shoulders to sidle between cabinets. Hal backed off, maintaining distance between them. The flying viper was stronger, faster and meaner. But the Processor Room was not its natural habitat. Wings were a handicap here.
He raised the hand and aimed its grille at the chiropterid.
‘Can you zap it?’
The clicking and flashing represented mocking laughter.
‘This unit does not have that capability.’
‘If I built you, I’d put in a plasma cannon.’
‘This unit was designed by Jun Zero.’
‘Hal Takahama would have done a better job, then. He was aces on inbuilt weapons systems.’
From designing cyberspace killdroids.
‘Jun Zero outgrew Harold Takahama.’
Heavy philosophising for a perspex prosthesis.
Why would Jun Zero build an add-on that could hurt him but not anyone else? Had Hal turned into a cyber-masochist?
‘We won’t grow much more unless you have smart ideas.’
‘This unit cannot initiate. This unit can only respond. I have all the stored knowledge of the world…’
‘… at your fingertips?’
That didn’t get a machine chortle.
‘I can advise and suggest. Only you can do.’
The chiropterid took another step forward. Hal took another step back.
He checked his pockets. He dressed like Taguchi, except without the birth control glasses. He didn’t feel at home in black pants, white shirt, off-brand sneakers, and blood-red tie. He saw no way to MacGuyver a fistful of pens into a grenade but flung them anyway.
This wasn’t how Jun Zero dressed. The drone threads were a disguise. Taguchi, Ishikawa and Jun Zero were up to sneaky shit. They were in the Processor Room to affect backdoor access to a closed system.
And run into serious real-world security?
The chiropterid made a deadly combination night watchman and guard dog.
No, that wasn’t the picture.
Another two-step. The chiropterid was by the workstation now. Wing-barbs trailed over the unknown operator’s flair. The porcelain eggs rattled as if hatching. Adam West’s squashed head bobbled.
‘What did we do here?’
‘This unit does not have that information.’
‘So much for all the knowledge of the world.’
‘Information was not archived, Jun Zero. It was a condition imposed by the client that no mission parameters be input or record kept.’
‘Who is the client?’
‘This unit does not have that information.’
When pissy, his hand reverted to calling itself ‘this unit’. If so disposed, it could be informal. Inconsistency made it more like a person than a machine.
Hal supposed he could be proud of that. It was his programming.
His kung fu was best.
‘How many in our team?’
‘Four.’
‘Taguchi, Ishikawa, me… and… you?’
‘This unit does not
count itself separate from Jun Zero.’
‘That’s the fourth member,’ he said, nodding at the chiropterid.
‘Verbal specification required to process.’
‘The chiropterid. It’s on our side.’
‘Of course not. But it came here with you.’
‘It represents the client?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Does it have a name?’
‘It self-designates as Karl.’
Was Karl ready to pounce? It couldn’t fly in the room, but could jump. It could latch onto the ceiling and crawl upside-down.
Hal had the picture in focus now. The gang – the Zero Boys? Team Taguchi? – were hired to hack into this system. Upload an alien process or download illicit data. That mission accomplished, the client had its rep initiate a Dead Don’t Tell protocol. The outcome must be so desirable it was worth burning high-skills operators for. Not to save cash, but to keep the caper quiet.
The only crimes Hal ever committed were to do with pirated software. The outlaw Jun Zero had forgotten the thing even Hal knew about crooks.
You couldn’t trust them not to screw you over too.
Hal wondered whether he hadn’t turned into a bit of a dick.
A dick with a glass hand.
NEZUMI
Clouds of fogged breath rose. Everyone here, on the red carpet and off, felt the cold. Even vampires.
But Nezumi didn’t.
Her long-ago childhood was a landscape seen through a blizzard.
She recalled little. Only a memory of a memory of a memory. Portraits in frost on thick glass, which melted if she tried to concentrate.
She concentrated on now, mostly.
Woods, mountains, ice in streams. Animals?
Mother called her Nezumi. ‘Mouse’.
Affectionately. But her frost picture of Mother had cats’ eyes.
Slit pupils, like the girls who admired her hair and chattered so fast she couldn’t keep up.
Were the bakeneko distant cousins?
Japan had snow vampires and cat vampires.
And schoolgirl vampires.
Like the brat in the hearse. With the wire-curl ringlets and dolls’ eyes.
At Drearcliff Grange, she’d be tagged a bad penny.
Nezumi had seen generations pass through school. She could always tell a bad penny from a sound shilling.
This year, her dorm-mates were sound shillings. Fields, Bronze and the Trenchcoat Twosome.
Clara Fields was taping The Bowmans and The Vampyre of Dibley for Nezumi while she was out of the country. Erzulie Bronze was the only warm girl quick enough to kendo-spar with her on a trampoline.
The mystery-solving noses of the Twosome twitched for U-certificate crimes. Nezumi hadn’t the heart to tell them whodunit solutions were rarely as innocuous as the Case of the Missing Make-Up Case (confiscated and in the Prefects’ Hut), or the Riddle of the Smugglers’ Cave Beast (the rubber tentacles were what was left of a monster Doug McClure fought in a film made on location in North Somerset in the 1970s). The Twosome didn’t open cupboards to find screaming eyeless contortionist corpses.
Nezumi’s friends were interested in what she’d been like as a warm child.
‘Cold,’ she always said.
Again, not trying to be funny.
She couldn’t even imagine what it was like to be warm. She might have been born the way she was.
She had been a baby, she thought – and a little girl. Then, at the age she appeared to be, an ice wind blew and she froze.
Sometime later, she came down from the mountains.
Many, many years passed.
Plains, lakes, bamboo. Battles. Lords. Enemies.
She had been at schools most of her life. Not English public schools. Monasteries, convents, training camps.
She’d been married – or pledged to marry. To cement an alliance. She fancied she’d never met her husband. In the ‘marital status’ box on forms she wrote ‘widow’.
Her name was lost. She was given others.
Along the way, she picked up a sword. Good Night Kiss.
She took lessons from masters.
She passed exams. She was good at that. Especially practical exams.
Nosferatu all seemed rich, rolling fortunes from century to century, piling up treasure in European castles.
She had to earn a living. With her sword.
It wasn’t the seconds of violence she was paid for.
It was the years of peace and quiet.
She wouldn’t hurt anyone unless they hurt others. But she wouldn’t let such a person profit from cruelty.
She didn’t tolerate bandits or bullies.
She offered no loyalty to tyrants. She believed in fair play.
She was resolved to be a sound shilling not a bad penny.
That scruple made her less employable than other ronin.
Most of her class – samurai, whether warm or yōkai – scorned those weaker than themselves. If told to by a lord, they would hurt indiscriminately… and not taste the ash in their mouths when they described themselves as honourable.
The Diogenes Club took the trouble to understand Nezumi before hiring her.
Mr Winthrop saw she was wilful about fair play. Mr Beauregard encouraged him to see that as her strength rather than a weakness.
Her current principal was more like Mr Beauregard than Mr Winthrop.
Mr Jeperson knew what was and what was not cricket.
Which was more than many cricket players did.
DETECTIVE AZUMA
The crowds got thick. Carpet-walkers acted as if this were a premiere and stopped to be admired. That held up the flow. Opportunities arose for assault and theft. Fujifilm had given away a hundred disposable cameras, promoting a stock fast enough to catch the image of an elder vampire. Guests and onlookers snapped away to see what might develop. The plastic cameras had a distinctive snapping-turtle click. If any bigwigs misbehaved – and it was a dead cert most would – there’d be photographic evidence.
More work for the Vice and Blackmail Squads.
Something blue crunched underfoot. A Sprünt empty.
Azuma’s fist-fangs pricked. Even litterers were perps.
He scanned for faces.
Perps all had a look. Before turning, he had cop instincts. Now, guilty foreheads might as well be marked with red flame. Some perps he could put names to. Others he just knew for what they were.
Small-timers, exclusively.
He would point out the most likely troublemakers to the Sakis. Slicing off a few sticky fingers would save later hassle.
A pickpocket was working the crowd. The dip’s long coat flapped weirdly around a spindly but functional extra arm rooted in the small of his back. Azuma put on a burst of speed and grabbed the crook’s third wrist, snapping the arm up against his shoulder blades. Out of curiosity, he nipped the prominent vein. Thin, tangy yōkai blood sloshed around his mouth, sharpening his teeth. He gulped with a covering cough.
The pickpocket was surprised by the sharp pain of the bite.
Buzzing from blood, he should drag the dip to the holding pens set up for the night’s catch.
But something bothered him. Something he’d missed.
Blue Label Sprünt. Wrong for this district.
He scanned again – not looking for faces, but for blanks.
Masks. Festivals were always an excuse. This whole district liked dress-up too much. Tenjo Kudari was one of many habitual mask-wearers.
He saw them on the far side of the street, the other side of the carpet.
Two of the breed. Flared black vinyl coats. Towels wrapped around their heads. Faces covered by a long-lashed open eye motif. Orb bobbles on epaulettes. Aum Draht. The cultists who thought life was a video game. Often a first-person shooter.
He let the surprised dip go with a shove. He stumbled off, third arm flapping like a broken tail.
The eyeheads moved like handicapped racehorses, weights clanking. Barrell
ed torsos on thin legs. Something nasty under their coats.
His knuckles dribbled blood as his fangs cut skin.
RICHARD JEPERSON
Richard and Nezumi stepped into Daikaiju Plaza.
A rearing dragon loomed over the square, serrated silhouette stark against red sky, searchlights playing across its rough concrete hide. A building shaped like a giant pot-bellied avocado was propped on two thick slanting leg-columns, balanced by a tail that curled around to meet plush carpet. Above the avocado rose a sturdy tower.
Atop the Ruff – a revolving restaurant floor – was the Head of the Dragon. Lights burned in twin windows. One red, one white.
The eyes of Christina, in the face of a monster.
Dai = Bloody Huge.
Kaiju = Fucking Monster.
Daikaiju.
Welcome to the future, Mr Jeperson. Kneel in the shadow of a Colossal (Bloody Huge) Gargantua Gigantis (Fucking Monster). Smell its sulphur breath. Hear its thunder roar.
The world had given the Princess a hundred years to erect her inhabitable idol. In the 1930s, after decades of stress tests, she constructed an iron armature of quake-proof girders. That stick figure survived the War, though flame-clouds blackened its cavities. Since then, Christina Light had clad the skeleton with concrete flesh. Its nerves were thousands of miles of wire – copper in the 1960s, fibre-optic cable now. Its hide was stone inset with glass facets. Its temperature had to be regulated. In its legs, furnaces and turbines generated power independent of the Tokyo grid. In its belly, freezing coils – a Yuki-Onna of freon tubes – kept cathedralsized computer arrays from raising the building’s internal temperature to a point when even vampire blood boiled.
Cities around the world where Light Industries operated could boast smaller-scale landmarks. Mere kaiju for San Francisco, Birmingham and Copenhagen. A six-tentacled octopus by the Golden Gate Bridge, a giant ape above the Bullring, a flimsy-winged reptile tethered in the Tivoli Gardens.
This, though, was the original Beastie.
The Daikaiju Building opened in 1970, but construction continued. He suspected the monster wasn’t finished yet. Like its High Priestess of Light, it evolved towards a final, higher form.