by Dave Stone
It was as if the pulsing of the corpselight in the sky was slamming at her head like fists. The giggling turned into a wracking heave of the lungs on the suddenly oven-hot air. Her heart accelerated and hammered.
Mona leant against a scaffold piling, staring with eye-bursting concentration at absolutely nothing until her breathing eased. After a while, the purple and black explosions behind her eyes faded.
She looked down at herself. She was slathered and crusted with blood. For some reason she'd forgotten about that.
A vision came back to her.
She's with the very special client, putting her face very close to his and lapping the saline crust of dried tears from his cheeks. Then she gently plants the tip of her tongue against his wide-open eyes. First one, then the other.
He tries to speak. She shushes him, kisses him softly on the mouth, moulding her lips around his to seal them completely, sliding her tongue slowly between the remains of his teeth, which she has shattered by way of a heavy soapstone figurine that he keeps by way of an ornament by his bed.
Now she sees herself crunching a heel of her hand down on the ruins of a nose, broken in the same blow that shattered his teeth. This shuts off his air supply completely...
The vision passed. It wasn't like Mona forgot about it, just that it had not been real. Less real than the hallucinations you sometimes got under the Janies, even. It wasn't worth thinking about.
Mona shuddered a little in the night time chill. It was time to find the transit-capsule she was currently calling home, before she crashed and burned completely. She clambered onto an access gantry and headed along it, smearing blood on capsules as she checked the embossed ID-numbers by touch.
As she walked, she stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket and felt a sudden elation as her left thumb hit the small shape of a pill lodged in the lining, felt the distinctive double God-head embossed on it, the design that gave Janies their name.
That would at least soften the comedown for a little while.
"I can't believe it," Dredd growled, stalking down a Psyko-Block corridor with Efil Drago San in tow. "I can't believe I did this."
"Well, now, Dredd," said Drago San. "In actual fact, you didn't do a thing. I did all the actual work."
"I can't believe you talked me into going along with it," Dredd said, with more accuracy.
"Do you know," said Drago San, in the tones that left Dredd with the depressing certainty that he was going to go off into yet another one of the lengthy digressions that served him as a form of attritional torture, "I recall a time, long ago, when I had literary pretensions. A time when I thought I had it in me to be a Man of Letters."
Short of shooting Drago San in the head, an option that was becoming increasingly more attractive, Dredd had learnt to his cost that any response at all would merely prolong the agony. The only option was to bite his tongue and hope to drokk that Drago San would wind down of his own accord - or at least wind up at something like a point.
"Nothing much, you understand," Drago San was saying. "Just a small historical drama. I was merely intending to chip my two penny's worth of dreadful into the eternal mystery of the most horrible and ghastly murders of Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately, I became a little too involved in certain aspects of the research. So much so that I never got around to writing a single word.
"In any case, one of the things I remember from the attempt was the advice, from someone or other, that the last thing anybody needs to see in a text is what I believe is called a 'signal from Fred'. That's when Fred, or whomsoever the character might be, looks at something he's quite patently done, something that apparently came out of nowhere, and simply cannot believe that he did it.
"The implication, I gather, is that the writer of the text has just pulled something entirely out of, er, entirely out of thin air and is feeling subconsciously guilty about it. The idea is that such incidents and sudden reversals just don't happen in real life.
"The reality, of course, is quite the reverse. In reality, wives stab their husbands for no apparent reason - save for the crawling resentment that's been boiling up, over the years, for something hurtful he said a number of years before. Suicides are triggered by a random smell, reminding the suicide of some buried and long-forgotten trauma. In real life, straws really do break camels' backs.
"In real life, people say or do things they would ordinarily never do or say - for the simple reason that, at the time and in the circumstances, it's the only possible thing they can. If you want my advice, trite as it may be, the best thing you can do is-"
Quite what Efil Drago San's advice would have been, trite as it might be, nobody would ever know - because at that point the corridor walls seemed to melt and flow. A voice reverberated in Dredd's head:
"Is this on?" it said. "Are we on? Are we getting it on?"
"Ak!" Drago San exclaimed, slapping a massive hand to his head with a meaty smack. "What in all the various gods' names was that?"
"Ah," said the voice. "I see that we are. You know who this is, who I am. You can call me Doctor Bob."
"The Drokk?" Dredd growled. "What is this? What are you doing? Getting into my mind?"
"Easiest thing in the world, Dredd," said the voice of Doctor Bob. "For a psi. Unfortunately for me, I never was one. All the data streaming into me, all the thoughts of a thousand rewired psionics, the dementia of a hundred thousand maniacs... and I can't put a thought into a single head. I'm talking to you by ultrasound, from the security system speakers. I'm doing it by conductive resonance.
"I've been tracking you by the sensors, my mindless little familiars in the walls. You can't get out, there's no way out, there's nothing for you to do but blunder around and about. My girls are after you. They're slow but they're inexorable. There's nothing you can do before they catch up with you, and the metaceleration kicks in, and they slice and dice you.
"You're armed now, though. That might be a problem. You might find yourself in a position to do some damage. I can't allow that. Time to take you down."
"Oh yeah?" Dredd snarled. "You're the king of a hundred thousand psychos. You're gonna set them on me? Bring it on."
He hefted one of the items that he could not believe he had been talked into acquiring. At this point, here and now, it was hard to remember how acquiring it had been any kind of problem.
"What?" said the internally-reverberating voice of Doctor Bob. Strangely enough, it seemed more puzzled than anything else.
"Bring them on, you bastich!" Dredd roared.
"I beg your pardon?" said the voice of Doctor Bob. "Are you entirely in your right mind at this point, Dredd?"
"Oh, I say!" Drago San exclaimed. "Being the homicidal criminal mastermind who still happens to be the voice of reason, I'll have you know, is my bit! I've a good mind to - ak!"
This last as a positively audible and ultrasonic shriek (coming, if you could believe the voice of Doctor Bob, from the speakers attendant to the Psyko-Block sec-system) sent him lurching in his paraplegic floater and Dredd staggering on his feet.
"Can we have a little bit of quiet while I'm talking?" said the voice of Doctor Bob. "Good. Now, Dredd. Do you have the faintest idea of what it actually means to be psychotic, criminal or otherwise? Are you confusing it with psychopathic, which is a term that only applies to the actions, or the issues directly arising from those actions, in the two seconds of an entire lifetime when psychosis goes overt?
"You want me to set all my 'psychos' on you? Sure, then, why not? I'm opening up those cell doors now - be prepared for the horrific attack of a horde of catatonics, cataleptics, people cowering in a corner because they just can't bear to be touched, and people wandering around bemused because they can't connect when they're recovering from ECT or dosed up on lithium. Oh my Grud, the crawling horror of it!
"Or, what, do you want me to release the Psyko-Block security staff from their lockdown and tell them that we have some intruders? They'll take one look at you, see your badge and soil their
underwear as a result of the spinal-jarring when they salute.
"Luckily, as you know, I have a third kind of people here - well, not precisely people, of course, not as such. All it takes is a minor tweaking of their control program, the shutting down of certain friendly-pattern-recognition routines."
Panels in the corridor walls slid back. Humanoid figures emerged. They had not quite the shambling and zombified aspect to their movements as Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, but their movements were similar in that they held a sense of unstoppable power. With any last breath of their function, they would just keep coming.
"Cyborgs?" said Efil Drago San. "Now, I hope you're not going to get all squeamish on me again, Dredd. What with the fact, I gather, that their more human components are drawn from Justice Department personnel."
"Don't worry," said Dredd. "The Judges who willed their cerebral matter are no more alive and aware than the bones they allowed to be reconstituted into speed-bumps in slow traffic areas." He hefted the item that Drago San had contrived to procure for him. "Let's just hope there's enough human matter inside them to be recognised by this."
He brought up the item and fired. The slugs, completely ignoring the nearby Efil Drago San by means of the damping-field emitted by his floater, streaked for the cyborgs then, metres from their target, dissipated in an impressive but entirely harmless flare of light.
"Drokk!" Dredd shouted.
"That's one way of putting it," said Drago San dispiritedly.
"It is indeed," said the voice of Doctor Bob. "You'll be pleased to hear, Dredd, that certain obvious recent events aside, we here in the Psyko-Block have been scrupulous about following Justice Department directives - including the one about upgrading our cyborg-guards to protect them from a Screaming Meatgun. The entire Psyko-Block, in fact, is covered by a blanket nerfing-field, keyed to rewrite what passes for a Meatgun's targeting mechanism - quite simply, the slugs cannot harm living human matter.
"Oh, and it also might interest you to know that, in addition to disabling the friendly-pattern-recognition routines in the cyborgs, I've disabled the fail safes for non-lethal force. The cyborgs won't be trying to kill you as such - it's just that they won't know they're doing so. Have fun."
NINETEEN
"If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person was of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
- John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
When Justice Department techs had finally run their diagnostics in detail, it was discovered that the Psyko-Block sec-system had spontaneously undergone a complete gestalt collapse: the cybernetic equivalent of personality fragmentation and a total nervous breakdown.
In the same way that a schizophrenic, for example, knows that the Machine Germans can't possibly be controlling his mind, it's just that he can't think straight at the moment because, you see, the Machine Germans are controlling his mind, the sec-system was simultaneously believing a number of things, most of which were mutually exclusive. In no particular order, it believed that:
(a) The Psyko-Block was suffering some internal emergency, so those inside must be evacuated in an orderly fashion.
(b) The Psyko-Block was under external attack, and so the blast shutters must be lowered and people kept inside for their own protection.
(c) Everybody had been evacuated.
(d) Everybody was already dead.
(e) Everything was perfectly all right.
The failsafe routines, being merely concerned with the system's function within a given scenario, had been unable to recognise that it was the scenarios themselves which were illusory.
And this was why Psi-Judge Karyn was currently outside an emergency maintenance crash-hatch, plugging a data-unit into the workings behind a cover plate, and pumping the Psyko-Block sec-system with the electronic equivalent of Largactil.
"You realise, of course," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel, who was watching her, "that the moment this takes effect the security systems are going to go from simply being crazy to thinking the Psyko-Block is under attack."
Detective Judge Steel had come along on this hastily-mounted operation on the basis that (a) she had been instrumental in finally pointing the Mega-City Justice Department in the right direction of the threat, (b) as a Brit-Cit citizen, the factor of having had no exposure to the Psyko-Block's disruptive influence might turn out to be a crucial factor, and of course, (c) who the hell was feeling up to trying to stop her? Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.
"I predict," she said cheerfully, hefting the big MFG rifle that had been issued and converted to her biometric pattern, "that given the sort of defences you say this place has, we're gonna get our arses roundly kicked."
"Not necessarily," said Karyn. "Why do you think I've bought my friends?"
Indeed, behind them was a large contingent of Street Judges tooled up for riot-control, and an even larger contingent of Tactical Arms troops. There might have been less of them than were being held in reserve, should the reactivation of Big Lie procedures prove to be necessary after all, but there was enough firepower assembled here to fight a small war.
"We're in," said Karyn, as the data-unit bleeped and the hatch slid back. "Let's do this thing. Go, go, go!"
In a Sector Five hydroponic rec-park, where force-accelerated algae was trained over frames in an ultimately doomed attempt to simulate plant life in an aesthetically pleasing manner, a member of the janitorial staff named Simon Deed came upon the hunched form of a derelict in the shadow of one of the tanks. Obviously, the man was taking advantage of the heat-bleedthrough from the biomass-reaction. It was somewhere warm to sleep.
Deed decided to leave him where he was. It was not as if the rec-park was crawling with visitors who might have their day spoilt, after all.
On second thoughts, Deed decided to go over and stick his finger in the derelict's eye. There was no emotion attached to the thought; he just felt vaguely like doing it.
Deed strolled closer, the smells of urine and old sweat emerging to blend with the all-pervasive reek of the tanks.
The derelict was maybe seventy years old, possibly older. He lay there like a puppet with the strings cut, brittle hair clinging to a crusted scalp, an open sore flowering on his left temple, gurgling snores issuing from the back of his throat.
The snores changed in pitch and tone as Deed knelt down and reached out a hand. They became a kind of rumbling growl, as though some bare thread of consciousness had sensed the proximity of threat, but could do no more than issue the mildest of warnings.
Bursting through the cornea and gelid mucus, the feel of the optic nerve against his fingertip was... Deed didn't know what it felt like, quite, save that it made him feel slightly weird inside. He increased the pressure, sunk his finger in up to the third joint. It was harder than he had imagined, like pushing his finger into a lump of raw meat, which was basically what it was, he supposed.
The derelict shuddered, mouth working. His teeth had rotted to the gum line.
"Muh," he said. "Muh. Muh. Muh..."
After a while the body stopped shaking and was still. Deed pulled his finger from the socket, reclaimed his discarded mop and bucket and peaceably returned to his janitorial duties.
Absently, from time to time, he licked at his finger. There seemed to be some thing on it. It was almost as if sticking his finger into the eye of the derelict had been real.
"Drokk!" Dredd exclaimed as heavy shutters came down behind them, blocking off their line of escape.
"Do you know," said Efil Drago San, "that really is a bad habit. You should look into it. I mean, it's not even as if it's proper swearing, after all. What the hell is all this drokk, stomm and bastitch nonsense about, anyway?"
"Judges do not swear," Dredd told him, somewhat stuffily. It wasn't one of the things that Judges usually talked about, but the alternati
ve would have been to have Drago San continually pestering him on the matter. "Occasionally, however, we need the stress relief that swearing brings, so we use null-words that don't really mean anything."
"I understand completely," said Efil Drago San. "'Prick' shall never pass your lips, but you'd kill for a nice relaxing drokk."
There was a pause.
"You've been saving that up for a while now, haven't you?" said Dredd.
"Well, I thought I might as well spend it," said Efil Drago San. "While we still have time."
The relatively slow progress of the cyborgs had given Dredd ample time to try the makeshift weapons they had manufactured in or taken from the Med Station. An anaesthetic dart from a hypo-gun in the leg of one cyborg had it proscribing a single circle before its automatic processes overrode its vestigial biological components and it carried inexorably on.
The restraining field emitter, used to immobilise injured bodies for minor surgery on the fly, had proved to be of no use at all. The cyborgs simply and mechanically shrugged it off.
A somewhat disgusting-looking article reminiscent of a handgun, which Drago San had fabricated out of... spare parts when constructing the Screaming Meatgun, had actually proved useful. Dredd had been able to take down two of the cyborgs by way of compressed bone-shard bullets to the head. The problem was, it had limited ammunition, and that had soon been used up.
All he had left that might be of practical use was the daystick he had liberated from the body of the orderly.
"Well, it looks like this is the end, old friend," said Efil Drago San.
"What?" said Dredd. "I'm not your friend and never will be!"