by Hal Duncan
INTERJECT THOUGHTSTREAM.
OPERATION: Reroute digression. Specify locale.
Jack has the weirdest feeling that he’s been here before, a long time ago, when he was younger. He looks around at the empty spray cans, jars of glue and plastic bags, and—
“Check this out.”
Some kind of concrete cylinder, six feet in diameter at least and maybe two feet high, an iron manhole cover on the top of it. Jack feels the spray can in his hand, the can that he’s just used to add his name to all the others. He feels his finger pressing down on the nozzle, hears the hiss and sees his hand moving…and has no idea what he’s writing, why he is writing it.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Fuck, I don’t know.”
But he can hear a voice from somewhere whispering it in his ear.
A River of Voices
“Do you know who’s on the other side of the mirror?” says Jack.
“No,” says Starn. “The officer on the case. It’s just procedure.”
“You know they’re watching you as much as they’re watching me.”
“I don’t think so, Jack. But you were going to tell me about this Conspiracy. Was that why you killed—how many was it? You think there’s some sort of…scheme against you?”
“Scapegoats and saviors, mate. You want to rule people’s minds, you need a monster or messiah, something to sacrifice to silence all the voices.”
“Voices?”
Starn looks at his watch, wondering if he’s going to be able to wrap this up early.
“All the voices in our heads, the river of voices in our heads, trying to tell us what to do.”
But it’s too obvious, too pat. Yes, auditory hallucination is a classic sign of florid-stage schizophrenia, psychotic breakdown, but it’s the sort of thing that every selfish little murderer trots out—from his in-depth knowledge of Hollywood movies and tabloid newspapers—when they want to get out of that pickle they’ve put themselves in. It wasn’t that my wife was cheating on me and I hated the bitch. It wasn’t that my boss was an asshole who deserved to die. It wasn’t for the insurance money or the drugs or the brutal, bloody thrill of it. It was the voices in my head.
“You hear voices, Jack?”
“Don’t we all? Voices of souls, of ancestors, family and friends, enemies and demons, ghosts inside the head, the ghosts in the machine. You telling me you don’t hear your own little internal narrative when you’re thinking to yourself? You’ve never had an argument with a friend that didn’t carry on in your head afterward? You’ve never lain in bed and thought to yourself in someone else’s voice, to get a different perspective, someone else’s attitude? We all hear voices, doctor. Most people just keep them turned down real low.”
Jack leans forward.
“Too much noise, you see, the monkey robots might not hear the puppeteer. Little doggy might not hear his master’s voice, mate. So we gotta shut those other voices up. But, shhh. You can hear them if you only listen.”
“And these voices tell you to—”
“Listen. It’s like being asleep beside a river, a river of voices, babbling, buried in the rustle of leaves. Narcissus sleeps and dreams us all.”
Starn sits back in his chair. Narcissus, eh? The boy who loved his own reflection in a river, and wasted away from his love. Well, it’s more original than the Devil or God.
THE LOST BOY
ANALYSIS: Subject resistant; lateral approach required.
OPERATION: Trace source of identity-construct “Jack Flash.”
IMAGO DETECTED:
Hair the color of flame, not blond but yellow, orange, red.
Jack remembers the picture on the milk carton, the lost boy—Sandy Thomson—with his corn-blond hair, and realizes the boy’s ghost has been haunting his imagination ever since he was a child. Ever since he was a child, he’s had this hero in the stories that he makes up on the edge of sleep, an idol, an icon, signifying everything that he desires, everything that he desires to be. Flash Gordon. Jack, the Giant-Killer. He looks in the mirror at what he’s made himself and sees, under it all, that picture on the milk carton, the lost boy, the golden boy.
ANALYSIS: Compensatory fantasies; narcissistic fixation.
OPERATION: Enhance engram context; establish imprint location.
NARRATIVE DETECTED:
They leave their bicycles in the long grass at the side of the country road, together with the packed lunches and flasks of juice their mothers have given them, and walk like tightrope artists along the great steel pipe over the farmer’s field and the stream, and jump down into the tall, grassy dunes. The area is fenced off, part of the premises of the chemical plant over the other side of the hills, so it has a kind of mystery for them, beyond their mundane world. It seems the obvious place to hunt for the lost boy. It was Guy’s idea, right enough. He’s been here before, he says. Jack imagines what it would be like to find the boy and be a hero.
“Come on,” says Joey, pushing his way through the jaggy bushes.
He’s a little scared, a little thrilled that they’re trespassing in this forbidden territory, this landscape of soft sand beneath their feet, this neverland out on the edge of their nowhere town existence. They might get lost too, he thinks. As he scratches and yelps his way behind Joey and Guy, he thinks, what if the Thomson boy found the secret place where all the world is like soft sand, slipping under your feet and you slide through it and you find yourself somewhere…somewhere where adventures happen. And he imagines Sandy, imagines himself as Sandy, as some sort of Peter Pan, lost and happy, out in an eternity of daydreams.
He crashes through the last of the brambles and down onto the cracked, tarmac road, dusty on this dry summer day. Guy is standing there, up where it disappears into the dunes.
“Hurry up,” he calls.
“Shut up, Reynard,” says Joey, taunting him with the awkward given name he hates so much because, well, nobody’s called Reynard. It’s a dumb name.
“You shut up, Narco,” says Guy, flinging Joey’s taunt back in his face, calling him that because Joey falls asleep in class so much, and because when Guy called him a “narcoleptic” he didn’t know what it meant. So he hates it.
Names are important, thinks Jack. He doesn’t have a nickname, but if he did, he’d want to be called Flash, like Flash Gordon from the black-and-white serials they show on TV every Saturday morning during the holidays. That would be cool.
THE ROOKERY
I pull on my leather trousers (1770s, Imperial Prussian 10th Hussars), my black Cossack shirt (1890s, Greater Futurist Republican Alliance Army), my snakeskin jackboots (1920s, Confederate Texas Rangers) and my tunic (1850s, Queen’s Own Chinese Infantry, 2nd Tibetan Regiment). I strap my Japanese katana at my left side and my holstered Curzon-Youngblood chi-gun at my right, and clip two jackblades into their sheaths, one on each boot. I pull on my bomber’s jacket (1940s, Royal East Indian Air Corps, made of sacred-cow hide, lined with the highest-quality yeti fur) and drag on over this my greatcoat (1900s, Free Ruritanian Partisans). The rucksack I fling over one shoulder is heavy with the weight of high explosives—sticks of dynamite and black bulbous bombs. Finally I pick up my black kidskin gloves, and sling a white silk scarf around my neck. Elegance is the assassin’s deadliest weapon.
Outside, the Second City of the Empire is in the middle of another bitter autumn night, the roads and pavements buried in a flowing sludge of mulch and sleet, the grimy sandstone buildings of the Rookery, all those tenements and abandoned churches, lit in the volcanic glow of halogen streetlamps. I step out onto the vast skeleton of scaffolding that runs through the Rookery like the web of some giant insane spider, grab a steel pole and swing up, grab, swing up, jump and swing, until I’m above it all, standing on the roof of what was once part of a university. It’s cold out in this crazy world, but I’m wrapped up warm, I’m armed and armored, and the sky is painted a magnificent crimson. I feel
keen.
Here, on the roof of the great gothic tower of the University Library, on the crest of the hill on which the Rookery is built (and in which the Rookery is built—in abandoned subway tunnels and mineshafts where the most hunted and desperate find their sanctuary), the only thing more breathtaking than the view is the cold wind that howls in from the east. Beneath me, what was once a simple grid of tenements is all but buried in a century’s growth of scaffolding and boardwalks, corrugated iron extensions and appendages, whole streets roofed over and built upon. Hell itself would be an easier place to map. I look out toward the borders of this maze of thieves and traitors.
The wide swath of greenery that is Kelvinbridge Park swings round the Rookery, hemming it on three sides—north, east and south—resplendent with its riverside of ruined mills and fallen viaducts, the glass palaces of the Botanical Gardens to the north, the stately grandeur of the Kelvinbridge Museum to the south, all floodlit for the delight of promenading visitors. Over to the west, the bustling, hustling Byres Road marks out the area’s last boundary, where the clubs and coffeehouses of the West End literati meet the pawnshops and pornographers of the Rookery.
Once this walled-in area underneath me held the studios of Bohemia, the spires of Academia, back before Mosely’s abolition of state-funded education. Now made up mainly of the dens and haunts of my fine fellow wasters, the Rookery has become a haven for every radical and revolutionary who grudges the steel grip the Guilds are gradually tightening around the throats of every man and woman in the Empire, for every rebel out to fight the system, for every would-be anarchist assassin suffering under the grandiose delusion that the actions of one man might change the course of History. That would be me.
Over the scattering of fiery lights that mark the city’s roads and buildings, airtrains flash across the sky, riding the Wire, venting jets of blue-green orgone vapors, steaming out across the night. It always seems ironic to me that in such a prudish, prurient country the great source of power is the force first harnessed by the tantric masters of Tibet, the energy they knew as kundalini, which we stole and renamed “orgone energy,” that cosmic, mystic, sexual force.
I slip my silver Half-Hunter from my pocket, flick it open to check the time, click it closed and slip the fob watch back into my pocket. It’s getting close to showtime. Out in the night, the Iron Lady is cruising, vast and regal, a giant of the skies, toward the city of its creation, this Second City of the Empire, carrying within the First Director of the Parliamentary Board of Elizabeth Regina, Queen of the British Isles and Colonies, Empress of India and the Orient, Sovereign Heart of Pax Britannica. Old Powell’s getting on a bit now, but he’s as much a threat as ever, if not more so.
It’s not the man himself I’m worried about, just the mindworm that he’s carrying in his head, the sordid little dream, the meme, that pulls his strings and pushes his buttons, looking to lay its sick spores in the empty thoughts of all the hate-filled whores and motherfuckers too dumb to see what’s happening. Language lives, my friend, information with intent, aware, awake inside us. Call them gods, call them demons, they’re the archons of our world, these fucking mindworms, spawned in speeches, nurtured in newspapers, feeding on our fears and desires. Ideas are not just born, my friend. They breed. And behind every good demagogue is a bad idea. I should know; I’m a myth myself.
I check my watch again. It’s time.
Time for the giant of the skies to meet its Jack.
Caledonia Dreaming
“You see the world as a very hostile, threatening place, don’t you? You feel you don’t belong? So you live in a fantasy world where you’re the hero. It’s like a…second skin for you, isn’t it, this ‘Jack Flash,’ a shell.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? I mean, what’s the alternative? That this world is actually run by Mammon and Moloch, literally run by gods of greed and brutality who’ve got you all so juiced that you don’t even see them changing it around you.”
“Mammon and Moloch, Jack? Those are—”
“Myths? Metaphors? What does the word Guernica mean to you, Doctor?”
Starn shrugs, shakes his head.
“What should it mean to me?”
Jack turns his head away in disgust.
“John Maclean,” he says. “The Armenian Massacre. Lorca. Does any of that mean anything to you? My Lai?”
“Jack, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is called apophenia. It’s when everything in the world seems loaded with significance, part of some great truth. You see patterns that aren’t there. It’s where the paranoia comes from; because someone, something has to be behind it all. God or the Devil. The government. Your ‘Empire,’ perhaps?”
“Mammon or Moloch,” says Jack.
“Exactly.”
“You didn’t answer my question. What does ‘Guernica’ mean to you?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. What is it? A person? A place?”
“And you think I’m fucking crazy?”
“You need help, Jack. You need to admit that you’re sick, so we can help you. Can’t you see that you’ve invented this ‘Empire’ to justify your own fear, your own insecurity, your shame, your self-pity?”
“I could ask you the same question. All of you. You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me.”
Starn runs a finger over the laptop’s trackpad, moving the mouse across the screen, but with no real purpose other than to give his hand something to do while he thinks. The schizophrenic worldview is never completely senseless, he knows; he made his name with a paper on paranoid delusions as symbolic representations of a hostile world. But this schizoid is just too conscious of the boundary between fantasy and reality. He’s not faking it but, at the same time, he’s not totally engulfed in the psychosis, Starn is sure.
“You talk about Mammon and Moloch, Jack, but I think you know you’re talking about something else. You talk about the Empire but I think you know this ‘Empire’ isn’t real in any actual sense.”
“How real are your dreams, Doctor?”
“Dreams aren’t real at all, Jack.”
“I am.”
THE ABYSS
OPERATION: Verify schizophrenia hypothesis; scan for inception.
NARRATIVE DETECTED:
“Jack, you’re fucking cracked, man. You’re fucking crazy.”
He pants, recovering his breath, rubbing at the red marks where the fingers gripped his throat, and grinning. He’s proved his point.
“Told you you couldn’t kill me. Told you you’d chicken out before I did.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean shit.”
Jack can’t quite put his finger on it but somewhere deep inside he’s sure that, somehow, it does. Maybe he is crazy. He has these ideas sometimes, that he’s an alien or an android, Lucifer or Jesus—and this shithole town does feel like his own private hell some days, like he’s fucking nailed to a cross. But he’s smart enough to know that those are delusions, no more real than the Jack Flash character he finds himself drawing on the pages of his schoolbooks or dreams about at night, with his hair the color of fire.
But he’s smart enough to know that the delusions have a point, that something in his head is trying to make a fucking point.
You can’t die.
He tries to understand what it is his crazy, fucked-up inner self is trying to tell him, but he can’t get his head around it.
It’s bullshit, he thinks. Everyone dies. He could take his fucking school tie, make a noose of it and hang himself from a light fixture if he wanted to…or if he had the guts, at least. And he wants to know. He wants to know what’s on the other side of dying. He wants to know if all the bullshit about eternity is true. But it can’t be, can it? There is no heaven, no hell, no God, no Devil, no angels.
He rubs at his neck. He’s proved his point, shown Joey that he wasn’t shitting him, that he doesn’t give a fuck any
more, that he could walk right up to Death and spit in his face and fucking dare him to swing his scythe. Except that there is no Death, not like that.
And suddenly—it’s just oxygen starvation—he feels light-headed—it’s the flood of oxygen back into his brain—and the world is kind of fuzzed and jittery and—
Guy is leaning over him.
“Jack. Wake up, Jack. Bloody hell. Are you OK?”
He’s lying on the ground, sprawled out, looking up at the sky, the clear blue sky so wide and empty with only the golden crescent of the sun to cast a gloaming light across it, and there’s earth under his back, earth rich and dark with clay and green with thick moist grass, red, gold and orange leaves blowing across his hands.
And then Guy leans real close, he does, and he looks so much older than he should, like there’s another him, an older him under the surface, and he whispers very quietly.
“Time to wake up, Jack Flash.”
He snaps awake straight out of the half-state he’s been in, part memory, part dream, drifting off to sleep, and looks around the bedroom, but there’s nothing there. A palpable, visible nothing there in the darkness. Nothing has just whispered his name to him in the dead of night.
It moves around the room, a cold, dead presence—no, an absence, an abyss that’s gazing into him.
He gets out of bed and walks around the room, more entranced than afraid. He doesn’t switch the light on in case this sense—this physical sense—of nothing is dispelled by it. It’s like a ghost standing over a grave with his name on it, a dream that’s walked out of his head and into the world—no, a dream that’s walked out of the world and into his head. Maybe it’s just his imagination, but that’s not what it feels like. It feels like someone else’s imagination.