Psykogeddon

by Dave Stone

  "I have half a mind to hang around in orbit to watch, don't you know. So far as I'm concerned, it would be a small reminder of home."

  "Oh yeah?" Dredd growled. "I don't think so." He raised his personal comms-unit again. "Computer. Internal countermeasures system, now."

  "Complying," came the voice of the Justice One computer system.

  "Dear me, what?" Drago San got no further, because at that instant a collection of servo-powered blades burst from their housings in the ceiling and halted a bare millimetre from his throat. "Oh, I say!"

  "Failsafe anti-personnel countermeasures have been deployed," came the voice of the computer system. "You will relinquish command-codes to authorised Justice Department personnel immediately."

  The blades clicked threateningly.

  "I relinquish command-codes to authorised Justice Department personnel immediately," said Efil Drago San, dispiritedly but swiftly.

  "Thank you, unauthorised user," said the computer-system, as the thrusters of Justice One changed tone and wound down. "Automatic landing procedures commencing. Have a nice day."

  "You never told me that you had those kinds of lethal countermeasures on board, Dredd," said Drago San indignantly. "Why would you neglect to tell me that you had those kinds of lethal countermeasures on board? Who knows what I might have done to trigger them, in all innocence, purely in the course of flying the support you yourself asked me to give?"

  "You never asked," said Dredd. "A Judge's Lawgiver explodes if anyone but him touches it. You think we don't do the same with other stuff?"

  "Strikes me," Drago San said, "that you could have used them when those erstwhile privateers were overrunning the ship."

  "Activating them then wouldn't have stopped us being overrun," Dredd told him. "And it would have left us all stranded. They're for when some traitorous drokker tries to take over the helm."

  "Now really, Dredd." Drago San exclaimed. "I resent that. That's criminal mastermind profiling, that is. I was of inestimable use to you, and now you simply chain me up again like an... urk!"

  This last comment was rudely interrupted as Dredd gave the cuffs securing him to Drago San a more than necessarily vicious yank.

  "I don't deal in your pathetic attempts to twist the truth, Drago San," he said. "I just deal with what's in front of me - and what's in front of me is a creep who'd turn traitor at the drop of a hat."

  "Once again, Dredd, I must protest." Drago San turned thoughtful. "What kind of hat? Is it a nice one? I must admit that, on occasion, I could rather do with a new hat."

  They had been making their way back through the ship toward the brig, where a Justice One crewman was tinkering with a collection of servo-powered blades in a cell.

  "We're reinstalling the security countermeasures here, for the time being," Dredd told Drago San, "where they'll do the most good. First thing you do on the voyage home that I don't like, they start to slice and dice. Welcome to the mechanism of Mega-City Justice, Drago San."

  Secondary Information: Dying on the Inside

  Somewhere, someone is screaming that a tiny arm is hanging out of the pupil of their left eye. Pale and thin to the point of being skeletal, the homunculus within waves desperately with the last of its dying strength.

  Arfie knows what "homunculus" means. It means "little man". Arfie knows things like that. In fact, he knows that it's the little men inside people's heads, looking back at you from behind their eyes, that make them real.

  This has gotten Arfie into trouble at times. More times than he can count. It's why he's in trouble now.

  A lot of people simply do not have these little men inside. This means that, although they might be walking around and talking - talking all the time, in some cases - they are not truly real and alive. You can do what you like to them.

  The Judges hadn't liked that, for some reason. They especially hadn't liked it when Arfie cut up some empty people to see what made them go. He'd only wanted to see what made them move and breathe and act like they were alive when they had nothing inside.

  They just didn't understand. A squad of them had burst into his con-apt as Arfie was peaceably flushing the last remains of a Fattie he had seen in the Eighteen Wheeler Velodrome, and had brought home on the promise that he had a big pie in the refrigerator. They had shot him in the leg. It had hurt worse than anything he had ever felt before.

  They had their helmets on, so you couldn't see if there was anything inside them or not. Probably not, because otherwise they would have understood. They'd have understood that all the blood and blubber might look nasty, but it wasn't truly real, from a real person, and so it didn't count.

  Instead, they had shackled him and dragged him out onto the walkway outside the con-apt. Arfie hadn't liked not being able to move his hands, and his leg was hurting very much. But that wasn't the worst thing that happened.

  The worst thing was the Justice Department hover-wagon floating by the walkway, as if it had any right whatsoever to be there.

  Arfie knew about hover-vehicles, obviously. He isn't stupid. But there had never been a hover-wagon outside his con-apt door before. It was just impossible for there to be one now. It was as if the whole world had gone fundamentally wrong.

  He tried to explain this to the Judges.

  "Jovus drokk!" one of them shouted. "He's having a total stomm-fit! Trank him and get him into the Meat Wagon!"

  A Judge had pressed something cold and sharp against his neck. There was a hiss... and then just blank. Not darkness, but sheer nothingness. The world had just switched off.

  It had switched on again here, some while ago, in this little room.

  The walls might once have been white, but now they're grimed with a patina of filth from human use. Human bodies - whether something truly real lives inside them or not - have quite obviously been stored here over the years while waiting to be taken somewhere else.

  Arfie has worked this out for himself - as we've said, he's not stupid. He knows how human bodies work, having thoroughly investigated the matter on bodies that don't count.

  There is no sanitary facility here, and no evidence of a body being kept here for a long time without a sanitary facility. The only thing here, in fact, is the little bench on which Arfie sits.

  There is nothing whatsoever that might spur him to do anything other than sit. So Arfie just sits here, listening to the voices of real people around him. Voices in his head.

  "Autistic disassociation and decognition," says Call Me Doctor Bob, "to a high-functioning but profound, if not complete, extent. It might be fair to say that you simply would not be able to function in the world, even to the extent that you do, without the Magic Bullet in your brain."

  Arfie now sits in a chair rather than on a bench. It's quite comfortable, with lots of padding. There is even padding on the steel bands restraining Arfie's wrists, which makes the bands a little easier to bear.

  It's also nice that Call Me Doctor Bob is real. That makes it easy - indeed, possible - for him to talk and it means something.

  "That Magic Bullet is what we call psi-talent," Call Me Doctor Bob says, meaning something. "You receive information from the external world, Arfie, and are able to process it after a fashion, but are unable to recognise a connection with another living thing. It's a dead circuit. You simply do not have the sense that other people exist.

  "This is countered by your nascent psi abilities. You can, quite literally, see inside the minds of certain individuals and this gives them a reality for you. And it's just this ability that we intend to make use of. Your sense of identity, such as it is, is extraneous to the process. Fire up the cutter."

  This last sentence is directed to the white-clad figures that came into Arfie's little waiting room and dragged him here and strapped him into the comfortable chair. Hanging over the chair, on gimbals, is something that looks a little like the sort of guns they use in off-world space-operas, but bigger.

  Coils of glass tubing are wrapped around a metal spike.
There is an electrical hum nearby, from the power and control units the thing that looks like a big space-gun is plugged into.

  One of these white-suited figures moves across Arfie's field of vision. Arfie wonders what it might be doing - unreal people can still do interesting things, sometimes - but he can't move his head to look. His head is clamped, immobile, between two pads which run from his temples to his jaw line.

  They put his head in these pads before they slice the top of his head off. There isn't much pain, so Arfie does not really mind.

  The thing he carried himself around in wasn't actually himself, after all.

  He suspects it wouldn't be that hard to get another one later.

  The electrical hum of the power units changes tone and gets louder. Something starts to glow and pulse, just too high for Arfie's eyes to see. The space-gun thing, of course. Arfie, as we have said more than once, is not stupid.

  "It's a little unfortunate, I suppose," Call Me Doctor Bob now says. Arfie gets the vague impression that he is talking to himself rather than Arfie. "Completely wasteful, in any rehabilitative sense. Still, the more palliative methods have led to failures, and our... patron is getting impatient. Let's get this over with, shall we?"

  The pulsing light above Arfie's eyes suddenly becomes almost blinding in its intensity. There is still no pain, but the thing inside that makes Arfie real just dies, and Arfie becomes very stupid indeed.

  Act 1: The Setup

  "Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!" And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, "You may rest a little, now."

  Alice looked round her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time!everything's just as it was!"

  "Of course it is," said the Queen. "What would you have it?"

  "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing."

  "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

  "I'd rather not try, please!" said Alice. "I'm quite content to stay here - only I am so hot and thirsty!"

  "I know what you'd like!" the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a little box out of her pocket. "Have a biscuit?"

  - Lewis Carroll

  Through the Looking Glass and what Alice Found There

  Act 1: The Setup

  ONE

  "Weaklings, fools, and knaves: dullards, fat profiteers, and starving dole-men; the chatterers, the rushers to and fro, the self-doubters and the self-satisfied; with snivelling piety and supercilious unbelief; with empty heads and full bellies; with ossified Tories and rattle-brained Socialists; with limping pettiness and ugliness too mean to hide itself..."

  - Eric Linklater

  Magnus Merriman

  "Hey, I'm Danni Consart, and this is Mega-City News! Blip-to-zip when the hand hits the fifteen! First up, for those of you who even care, the Instant Death Alerts.

  "Ultraviolet filter-shields have completely failed over Sectors Three, Eleven and Nineteen. Optimax fatal exposure, two point five seconds - so remember those sunscreens guys!

  "The Law. Justice Department Control tells us that the current officially designated no-go Crime Zones are sectors Four through Seven, Nineteen and Thirty to Thirty-four inclusive - that's you guys, you sorry drokkers, out there by the City Wall! Betcha wouldn't be doing all that crime if you were living somewhere nicer, right?

  "Zero tolerance policy has been declared for all of these Sectors - so don't even think of spitting on the pedway!

  "Across the board, mutagenic compounds in the drinking water are now classified as borderline-terminal. Bottled water only, city-wide, and don't forget to check the seals!

  "Today's unemployment riots have been scheduled for Sectors Seven, Eleven, Nineteen - what the hell, if your sorry ass happens to be in Sector Nineteen, you might as well scrunch down right now and give it a kiss goodbye!

  "Those were this half-hour's Instant Death Alerts.

  "On a lighter note, med-techs say the paracholera pandemic in Sector Nine has almost certainly run its course. The problems with the Sector Nine sewer-and-resyk systems that appear to be the source of the problem are being fixed as we speak. So it looks like all you nobs up there in Shangri La Towers are gonna be able to go back to the high life you think you deserve.

  "That was this quarter-hour's Mega-City News. I'm Danni Consart. We'll be back with the conclusion to Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves XIV right after these important messages."

  It was crazy season in the Big Meg, a city-state that skated on the lip of an insanity curve at the best of times. It was the end of summer, the time of the baking heat, when the earth itself absorbed all the heat it ever would and radiated it back.

  Years ago, apparently, these were called the Dog Days. Back in the days when there were dogs. Now the non-existent dog was rabid, and chewing off its own leg.

  The sheer mass of more than a billion citizens, crammed behind the city walls, had overloaded the air-scrubbers to turn the air miasmic, foetid and reeking. With every breath you took, it felt like you were breathing quantities of DNA.

  Judge Dredd gunned his Lawmaster into the slipstream of a Pheromol tanker-truck, cruising at a sedate 250 kph on the mid-speed Sector Nine Interway. For a split-second he allowed himself the pleasure of the relatively cool air against those areas of his face not covered by an impact-visor. Then he cut in his comms link.

  "Control? I'm on the board and running. What do you have for me?"

  Every Judge, no matter what their position within the Justice Department, was required to make regular street patrols. It kept them in touch with the realities of policing a city-state the size of the Meg at the sharp end. Only the Chief Judge herself was exempt, since the sudden loss of her in something so inconsequential and random as a street-bust gone wrong would be a disaster in more ways than one.

  The so-called Judges in Psi-Division, of course, didn't count as exemptions in the first place. Aside from the rare and unique talents that made them invaluable as a resource, the vast majority of them could not have hauled in a hundred and fifteen year-old granny for spitting on the pedway.

  For everybody else, from the head of the SJS to the deepest-cover Wally Squad operative, you couldn't call yourself a Judge if you didn't put the time in on the street.

  To the extent he allowed himself selfish pleasure in anything, Dredd enjoyed the requirement. It was the simplest and cleanest part of being a Judge that he knew. His only regret was that, these days, he wasn't allowed to do it more often.

  It was his own fault, he supposed, for putting himself into the position over the years where people thought he was better deployed at a stomm-load of everything else.

  "Hang on there a minute, Dredd," came the voice of Control, by way of bone conduction in his helmet. "We're still pulling down situations filtered for your, uh, calibre."

  Control, of course, monitored the various sensors, bugs and Eyes in the Sky that blanketed the Big Meg, factoring their inputs transputronically to produce an optimum operational vector. Sometimes they even factored in calls from concerned citizens. The idea was to make the best possible use of any particular Judge's time and capabilities.

  This worked in two ways. On the one hand the system ensured that the right forces responded to any particular incident. On the other, it allowed Control to steer those Judges who were valuable to the City away from too much actual danger. The head of the Forensics Division, for example, put his time in on the street just like everybody else, but there was no point in jeopardising his years of expertise for the sake of a random st
ookie-gland bust.

  Dredd had fallen foul of this system in his time, due to the inflated notion everybody seemed to have of his value.

  "If you're trying to set me up with a synthi-milk run, Control," Dredd growled, "if you're trying to keep me out of physical jeopardy, then you know what I think about it."

  "You've made your opinions known," said the Control dispatcher, somewhat tartly, "so we're going the other way. Here we go. Shady Acres Thermosetting Preservation Inc. has a body-robbery in progress. Half a click north and up from you. The perps are using haze-suits to beat the securicams, but one of them's malfunctioning so we've got a bead. At this point they don't even know they're - hang on. Something coming in on Emergency Alert..."

  "What is it?" Dredd asked.

  "We got a shooter," said Control. "Cantilever City. Ten, fifteen citizens down as of now and it's getting exponentially worse on a body-per-bang basis. The guy's using a Screaming Meatgun."

  In a Mega-City built and populated from the decimated wreckage of a country with a handgun fetish, the problems of gun control were overwhelming. There were just too many vectors of demand and supply.

  For the Justice Department it was like running the Red Queen's race, or rather more like an endless, lethal game of Whack-a-Mole - the second you pry the gun from the cold dead hand of some psycho or other, another one pops up and tries to shoot you.

  Things were made all the worse, if possible, by the widespread use of molecular-refabricators as a means of manufacture.

  Portable ReFAB-units were used throughout the Meg to produce anything from boots, to nutri-paks, to holo-vid remotes, and their software templates could be hacked to produce pretty much anything one might like and which could fit the dimensions of the nanonetic skeining box.