Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  It’s 1999. Fuck, it’s always 1999.

  I land in a crouch on a steel gantry, black greatcoat billowing around me as the airtrain plows through signals and switches, twists and turns and blossoms into flame. Overhead, the wireliner, the Iron Lady, tilts its nose toward the sky, a scene—and on a scale—that’s reminiscent of the Hindenburg or the Titanic. A blue aura crackles round my gloved hand, I can feel my hair standing on end (no need for hair gel for a few days, then) and there’s a taste of ozone in my mouth. But I got that electroshock buzz on, and I do feel chipper.

  Jack B. Nimble, Jack B. Quick, I clunk-chunk-chik my Zippo, light a stick of dynamite and throw it as I jump again. Gantry to girder, girder to strut, I land as the explosion sends a hooped ladder raining down in fragments onto the riveted steel panels of the bridge that carries the Wire across the river, into City Central Terminal. I look toward the terminal, its sandstone towers and walls and smokestacks, the palatial grandeur of the glass-and-girder lattice roof, like some immense Victorian greenhouse. Wrapped in furling clouds of orgone-rich gases, flames erupting, shrapnel flying, the wireliner soars inexorably down toward it. Keen.

  The third bomb is timed just perfect, blowing the Cavor-Reich orgone-jet engines just before the wireliner loses the last of its inertia-dampened impetus and sending it, three hundred tons of fireball, over and down and through the glassy webworks of the City Central Terminal’s roof. Peachy keen.

  Knowing I don’t have long before the keepers arrive, I unholster my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-pistol, favored weapon of the gaijin ninjas. Modern makes and models of the weapon have their benefits, true, but the original repays the skill and care invested in it with an accuracy and power unmatched by any other gun. In the hands of a professional, it’s a lethal beauty.

  Through the blue tint of my mayashades, I watch the massive Clyde-built Molotov cocktail and the pretty flower of fire it makes of City Central Terminal. Shock and Awe, motherfuckers, Shock and Awe.

  Weapons-Grade Adamantine

  Dr. Reinhardt Starn studies the police file on the screen of the laptop in front of him and the prisoner on the other side of the desk. Suspect description: medium-tall, slim build, white male, age 20–25 approx. Bleached punk hair, alternative clothing. What Starn sees is someone with a carefully cultivated “rebel” self-image.

  “Do you understand why I’m here?” he asks.

  No answer.

  “I’m a clinical psychologist in consultation with the authorities. It’s my job to decide if you’re competent to stand trial. You understand that they think you killed some people, yes?”

  No answer.

  The police file gives only a brief history: Suspect in “Spartacus” killings, caught fleeing murder scene. Referred for psychiatric evaluation and investigation. Possible member of an anarchist terror cell—so the file says, but Starn finds the whole latter-day Baader-Meinhof Gang idea unlikely to say the least. His MO is more lone wolf than team player.

  Suspect refuses to give his name, the screen tells him. No matches with police record…no DNA profile in the database at all. So no Social Security records, thinks Starn. No bank account, no passport, he can’t be working legally and he can’t be claiming unemployment—not without an ID card.

  No ID card. You’d have to be born in the wilderness and raised by wolves not to have an ID card these days.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” says Starn. “OK. I believe you go by the name of ‘Jack Flash.’ Can I ask you about the significance of that?”

  “Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack the Ripper, Spring-Heeled Jack, yes, Jack of Clubs and Spades and Hearts and Diamonds, Jack of Wands and Swords and Chalices and Coins. A whole attack of Jacks. Jack’s back.”

  “Hmm. But ‘Jack Flash.’ That’s from a song, isn’t it? The Rolling Stones—Jumpin’ Jack Flash—”

  “He’s a gas, gas, gas…whoomf…Jack Flash fire flash gordon flash harry flash flood flash point…flash cunt.”

  Starn moves a finger across the laptop’s trackpad, minimizes one window and opens another to note his first impressions: Subject exhibits some of the classic schizophrenic discourse patterns—wordplay, symbolic fixation, smearing of meaning—but appears more coherent/responsive than would expect. Too self-aware. Possible borderline case/sociopath faking psychotic delusion?

  “That isn’t your real name, though, is it?” says Starn.

  “Well, you know how sometimes you had something from before, but you don’t have it anymore?”

  “I suppose we’ll just have to call you Jack for now, then. OK?”

  Jack sizes the doctor up across the table, cool as a cheroot clenched in a drifter’s teeth but kind of miffed that they’ve sent such an amateur. He thought he might at least merit a good Pinterian psycholinguist; they’re always fun. But no. Every tic, every twitch leaks out this monkey robot’s subtext, every word he says and every word he doesn’t say. Every glance from notes to subject, every cough to clear the throat, the strains and pauses in his speech…even the scent of him reeks of furtive fears and naughty needs.

  “Keen,” says Jack.

  He tells himself the quack may actually be a master of the black ops arts of speech combat, playing a subtle bluff. It’s never smart to underestimate the enemy, but, hell, this bastard isn’t giving him much choice. What is this? Don’t they know what they’ve got here? Anyone would think they’d never heard of Jack Flash. Weapons-grade adamantine. The original goddamn psychokiller. Qu’est-ce que fucking c’est?

  He’d be insulted if it wasn’t for the keeper behind the one-way mirror. At least he’s got some fucking bite.

  A GLINT OF SNICKETY-SHARP TEETH

  PECHORIN (BIOFORM) STATUS: All vital functions in homeostatic balance; psychophysiology and kinesthetic senses dampened; affective/logical reactions inhibited; reflexive/habitual-behavioral reactions inhibited; ego shutdown; self shutdown; id shutdown; total psyche shutdown.

  PECHORIN (BIOFORM) STATUS: Personality bypass operation complete.

  OBSERVATION: Subject sits with calm poise, studying Agent (Dr.) Starn, eyes flicking up to the observation mirror, now and then (Analysis: bioform presence sensed by subject. Response: minimize bioform functions, deepen trance state).

  OPERATION: Psychic contact made; preliminary scan initiated.

  NARRATIVE DETECTED:

  Jack looks in the mirror, at his own reflection, and at what lies beyond it. Under the bleached hair and the attitude, there’s still an image—a reflection, a shadow—of the boy he was, a bookworm buried in dreams, asleep to his surroundings, Narcissus or Endymion, Kama Krishna on his lotus. He lets his eyes unfocus, scries the mirror: leaves blow over and around him, red, gold, orange, yellow, leaves of autumn, leaves of fire, burning leaves torn out of books, existence on fire, black incense rising into blue eternity. Whole world should burn, he thinks, it would be so fucking pretty.

  Jack grins a glint of snickety-sharp teeth.

  OPERATION: Focus narrative; scan for core identity.

  He walks across the grass, summer sunlight warm against the back of his neck, smooth heat like a caress, toward the redbrick library, sanctum of adventure.

  “Hey, Jack,” the voice behind him calls.

  “Yo, Joe,” he says.

  “Where you been all week?”

  Nowhere, he thinks. It’s just another lost, last day of the summer of his youth, and he’s spent most of it in the library, out of the way of his peers, happier in solitude, in the realms of fantasy, than in a limbo reality of housing schemes and gang battles.

  “Keeping my head down,” he says.

  He knows he’s the weird kid, strange, estranged, but Jack doesn’t care. He’s got all of eternity to keep him company, in his head.

  The Nature of the Conspiracy

  Starn tries to ignore the feeling of being watched; it goes with the job, but the one-way mirrors always make him feel uncomfortable, like someone reading your newspaper over your shoulder. They do have video cameras
, after all. If they want him to get inside the man’s head, so to speak, they could just leave him to get on with it. It’s not as if the officer behind the glass is qualified to make these kinds of judgments.

  “Perhaps we could speak a little bit about yourself,” he says, “but first I want to find out if you really understand where you are, what’s happening to you. Can you tell me where you are?”

  “You know where I am.”

  “Of course. Of course. I just want to make sure that you know.”

  “In an interrogation cell, deep underground, inside the secret base of an empire that reaches from the dawn of time, across eternities, and into the minds of every monkey robot in the world.”

  Starn looks around the interview room. A small, grilled window sits high up on one wall, sunlight from it picking out dust motes in the air. The third floor is not exactly what he’d call “deep underground.”

  “‘Monkey robot?’” he says.

  “Puppets on a string, dangling, jangling, gangling from the ganglions in the head. That’s how they control us. That’s all we are to them, monkey robots—apemen, golems, fucking soldiers of the Empire.”

  “The Empire?”

  “Empire never ended. Just hid itself. You can only see it if you close your eyes.”

  The prisoner smiles, picks up the paper cup of black coffee sitting on the desk and takes a sip.

  “You think this is all…part of this Empire?”

  “I know it and you know it too. You just don’t know you know it. That’s the nature of the conspiracy.”

  Of course, it is the sort of language you’d expect from a politico, thinks Starn. He’s seen the slogans painted on walls and placards, by all the neo-bolsheviks and jihadists. But Starn doesn’t think that this “Jack Flash” is talking about the same “Empire” as all those splintered factions fighting against Pax Britannica.

  “Do you think I’m part of this ‘conspiracy’?” he says.

  “The less people know, the more people in it, the better the conspiracy. This is the ultimate conspiracy—everybody in it and nobody knows.”

  “You think everyone’s a part of this conspiracy?”

  “I know I am.”

  Starn looks at the notes on his screen.

  Subject displays typical symptoms of first-rank (acute) schizophrenia—“monster”/“messiah” delusion, apophenia, ideas of thought broadcasting and mind control, auditory (imperative) hallucination. “Monkey robot”—disturbance of identity, alienation from self.

  Subject has externalized insecurities as invasive alien force—conspiracy. Sees himself as “secret agent”? Grandiose/paranoid delusions. Certainly capable of murder. “Spartacus” = slave rebel. Victims = directors, captains of industry = conspiracy “rulers”? Highly complex fantasy.

  The question is: Is he faking it?

  “Could you tell me more about this Empire, this conspiracy?”

  THE KALI YUGA

  I slice the skybike round the corner at a thirty-degree angle to the ground, sparks flying from the spindisks as they scrape the cobbles of the street. The machine roars as I gun the ray-jet engine up to turbo. It can take it. This is a 1951 Jaguar Silver Shade, the only skybike ever manufactured by the company, British fascist engineering at its best. This is how the Empire was won.

  The ornithopters come in over the rooftops, swooping low into the backstreets of the docklands area, like a swarm of mechanical bats or butterflies or birds of prey, all flashing, clashing, silvery wings. Their storm of gunfire tears up everything behind me in a rain—a hail—of bullets, pounding the street and throwing up a dust of shards from cobblestones and brick walls, crates and plastic garbage bags. Feels like all hell is on my heels, but then I’m always at my best when I feel hounded.

  As I blast across the weed-cracked foundations of some long-dead shipyard, I fire over my shoulder, hit the pilot of the leading thopter with a chi-beam in the center of his forehead, smack-bang in the sixth chakra, where his third or ajna eye will never now be opened. The thopter spins wildly through the air, smashing into the two immediately behind it, and I fire off a couple of random shots, clip the ray-tank of a fourth. The chaos of three tangled thopters buries itself into the ground behind me, shrapnel flying, and I make it into a narrow alleyway between two warehouses. The pilot of the fourth thopter, destabilized by the puncture of its ray-tank, tries to turn it, fails, and piles his machine into the brick wall of a warehouse, the explosion wiping out forever the last faded, peeling remnants of a painted advertisement for some long-forgotten company. I’m not out of the woods yet.

  Four of the remaining thopters rise over the roofs of the warehouse while another follows through the narrow gap between the buildings, wingtips almost touching brickwork, guns still firing. I admire the flyboy’s skill and nerve; it doesn’t stop me putting a chi-beam through his fourth chakra, through his courageous but misguided heart. He’s still a fucking keeper. As I burst out into the open again, the other thopters come back, gunning for me with a vengeance. Well. What can I expect?

  It’s the dark world of the Kali Yuga, out here on the edge, the Gnostic prison-world of a mad, blind creator, a world of lies, truth hidden in the silky veils of Maya. You may not see it that way, but trust me; I’m the archon of anarchy. I know what I’m talking about. Reality’s got more diseases than a ten-dollar whore, only this kind of sickness doesn’t come from getting down and dirty with too many johns.

  I tear the skybike into a 180 and open fire on the last of the thopters. One banana, two banana, three banana, four. One of the pilots actually makes it out of his fireball, spinning through the air, armor gyros fucked and boosters firing in what’s definitely the wrong direction. He plows into the ground at my feet with a crunch that makes even me feel a little squeamish. Still, I kick his helmet off and stare into his mirrorball eyes, just to check that the keeper drone is terminated. And with every bone in his body broken, including his watermelon skull, there’s still a little bit of the astral puppet-master flickering in his brain. Fucking mindworms.

  “Jack Flash,” it hisses. Sounds like white noise, bad radio. “No sleep for the wicked.”

  “Get out of my head,” I say, and put the barrel of my chi-gun right into the brain cavity. On second thought…get out of his head.

  And I blast it.

  Yeah, reality has some pretty nasty parasites, and I’m the homeopathic, sociopathic remedy. I’m the angel assassin, armed with all the mystical technology the Empire stole from its dominions in the Orient and India. I’ll do you acupuncture with a needle-gun. I’ll rearrange your living space with cluster-bomb Feng Shui. I’m an agent of change, a spiritualista Sandinista.

  Society and me…well, let’s just say we don’t get on.

  SOLDIERS OF THE EMPIRE, CHILDREN OF THE SCHEME

  OPERATION: Enhance psychic substructure. Trace core identity.

  NARRATIVE DETECTED:

  “I fucking hate this place,” says Joey.

  “Tell me about it,” he says.

  Jack looks around at the buildings of the Scheme—identikit matchbox blocks built by some contractor with a hard-on for pebble-dash. An extermination camp for the soul. Good enough for us overspill proles, he supposes. No fucking wonder the razor gangs are back.

  Guy plays with his State Security card, weaving it between the fingers of one hand. Jack watches him. Guy’s the girl-magnet, smooth as a shark through water. Joey’s the badass, black-clad bastard, smoking with sullen hostility. Jack? Jack’s the tagalong weird kid with the big ideas.

  “That’s all we are, you know?” says Joey as he takes another draw on the cig, passes it to Guy. “Just another fucking number. They’ll be tagging us like fucking dogs next. Chips in the ear. Fucking dogs, bred to be vicious, bred for the fucking army or the pigs.”

  “Soldiers of the Empire,” says Jack.

  INFORMATION UPLOAD: Location—Schemes; Period—Adolescence.

  OPERATION: Enhance location. Specify locale.

  T
hey sit on the brick wall, bored and bitter, all of them. Facing them there’s the little one-story block of shops—well, a fish ’n’ chip shop, a bookie’s, a newsagent’s, a grocer’s and a pub. That’s all there is in the Scheme. That’s all there is in any fucking Scheme.

  “There’s always a life of crime,” says Guy.

  “Yeah,” says Joey. “Let’s burgle some house, steal a car, burn the fucker. We could set ourselves up as drug dealers. Loan sharks. We’d still be fucking guard dogs. You know? You know what I mean?”

  “Patrolling the boundaries of society,” says Jack.

  Joey nods, mutters something about fucking drones.

  “Weapons,” says Jack, staring at the graffiti on the shutter of the bookie’s. “We’re weapons.”

  “Maybe,” says Guy, looking at him weirdly.

  But he’s used to that.

  Welcome to Siagon, the graffiti says, and he knows the feeling. He could have written the words himself, although he would have at least spelled Saigon correctly. And he would have probably gone for Welcome to Hell himself. He’s always fancied writing that on the road sign into town.

  OPERATION: Reinforce imperative: Enhance location. Specify locale.

  The road is tarmac but rough, weathered and cracked with weeds, covered in generations of graffiti, tags and band names, obscure gang sigils made from letters fused together. Pages torn from porno mags and newspapers hang crumpled, caught in the wall of brambles that they have to scramble through to get down onto it. There’s no other way onto the road—it just appears out of the grassy dunes and disappears back into them, a hundred yards at most, as if someone just dropped the world around it, as if it used to go somewhere but then they took that somewhere away. It isn’t so much that the road seems out of place, out here in the grassy, sandy hills on the other side of the farmer’s field and the stream they have to walk along a water pipe to cross; it’s more like the landscape around it doesn’t belong. Like someone scrapped a previous world, built this one over it, but forgot to erase this little area of the old reality.