by Tim Lebbon
But the streets stank of rot and smog and fast food. And anyone who did look at Tom seemed to look away just as quickly as he.
It had always been a city full of secrets.
The sense of threat behind him drove him on. He would have to go back to his flat for a while — Honey’s state now made things much more complicated — but he didn’t want to stay there for long. Hot Chocolate Bob could know anyone, and it would be easy to snatch Tom’s image from the street cameras outside the whorehouse, download a privileged search programme from the net — police maybe, or military, depending on who he knew — and trace Tom.
He’d have ten minutes to collect some things, and that was it. He’d be leaving. Fleeing the city if he could, perhaps making it into the mountains where, rumour had it, there were still regions of wilderness to get lost in for those with the courage or need.
He’d been here all his life, and yet he had no regrets at all about leaving. There were no ties here anymore.
Passing by a shop Tom glanced in the window and saw himself reflected back. He didn’t recognise the face for a moment and he spun around to see who was behind him. But then he walked on, knowing that he was already changing. Love, fear and desperation had left their mark on his face.
He reached his flat a few minutes later. He remained at the end of the street for a while, trying to spot whether there was anyone waiting for him. All seemed normal. His backpack weighed him down. And the longer he delayed, the less chance there would be of Honey coming back as fit and functional as she had been just an hour before. So Tom strode down the street, palmed the doorlock and went inside.
The place was just as he had left it. It no longer felt like home, because he had slaughtered safety and comfort in the couple of hours he’d been away. But its familiarity was comforting. Tom realised that he was absolutely exhausted. He could do with a charge right now. He looked longingly at the connection port and he even accessed the net briefly, before shaking his head and breaking the link. What right had he to sit and recharge while Honey lay crumpled and twisted in the rucksack like that? Besides which, Hot Chocolate Bob and his cronies may be here at any minute.
No, he had to leave now. If it weren’t for his foolish lack of planning he wouldn’t have been forced to return here at all, but he needed credit, clothes and something to help him get out of the city. An official pass would have been good, but failing that, there was always money.
He placed the rucksack gently on his bed — how he’d love to be holding Honey there right now, explaining his love and feeling her explanations in return — but it would be crazy to try to revive her here. Memory would have to sustain him for now. In the meantime, he needed a safe place and the time to bring her back.
A safe place …
Perhaps he’d known all along where he would go. He hadn’t been there since the old man had died almost fifteen years before, but he sincerely hoped that the Baker’s labs were still functional and equipped. Waiting for the right person to come and use them again.
Safety. If anywhere in this hope-forsaken city was safe, it would be the place where the Baker had lived, thought, composed, created and died.
The place where, for Tom, love had been born.
It was crazy what time could do to memory, even that of an artificial. It was as if the years could twist streets, the passing of seconds alter perceptions, smells and memories, take the truth and turn it into distorted ideas of what was and had been.
Either that, or he’d consciously tried to forget.
He’d found the estate easily enough. Twenty acres of industrial and business units, half of them flooded by the swollen river and stinking effluent, was not difficult to locate, even in the city. But once there, distance and direction became skewed echoes of what he remembered. He took the third turning right, the second left and found the unit … but it made net casters, and there were several chopped Draggers hanging around outside, eyes red with menace and blood.
Tom backtracked and started again, trying to make out where he had gone wrong. Wading through a foot of shitty water was not the highlight of his day, but knowing that the Baker’s hidden lab was beyond made it almost possible to ignore the stink and the things bumping against his legs. The sun sank in the west. It bled through the polluted atmosphere and cast pink reflections and violet shadows across the buildings, making them almost beautiful. Tom laughed out loud when he found the unit, then frowned when he realised that it was the wrong one again.
Every passing minute his fear grew. The sense that he was being watched — created by his own internal terrors, surely, not by any external presence — grew and grew, twisting him around every few seconds to search for the watcher. He saw a tramp and a few gang members, individual buzzed artificials wandering around awaiting death, a pack of dogs looking for the dead.
Eventually, desperate and exhausted and fearful that the dark would steal his last hope of finding the place that night, Tom sank down against a wall and felt tears brewing. The rucksack weighed heavily on his shoulders and in his heart.
And then the Baker found him.
Something inside his head clicked on. He’d never felt it before, had never even been aware of this part of his consciousness, but its sudden appearance opened up whole new vistas of knowledge for him. There was a brief surge of power that made his vision dim and his balance waver, but then he knew so much more than before that he almost cried out in fear, shock and relief. He stood, shucked the rucksack higher on his shoulders and walked around two corners to the Baker’s old unit.
It was deserted. The windows were smashed, the door graffiti-strewn and smeared a shiny silver where someone had tried to crowbar it open, the walls crumbled and lined black with flood tide-marks. And Tom smiled, because he knew that no one would have ever been able to find the Baker’s place.
No one but him.
Here was safety and refuge. Here, in the twist of a handle and the muttering of a special word, was a place where his love had been born and where, ironically, he could save it. Tom unslung the rucksack and slipped two fingers under the flap, feeling the silk of Honey’s hair and the oily coolness of her deflated skin.
“I’ll save you now,” he said.
Tom reached out, twisted the door handle and muttered, “Pudding Lane.”
The ground parted and carried him six feet under.
The inner door opened and Tom walked through. The laboratory was just as he remembered. It looked more like the room of a dark-ages alchemist, with arcane machinery arrayed around the walls, sheafs of yellowed paper piled high and haphazard on the huge oaken desk at the far end, dusty skylights letting in a faded, filtered light from somewhere outside. The whole end wall was taken up with a huge pinboard and there were drawings, sketches, formulae, potions, text-book extracts and personal memo’s pinned there by the hundred, a collage of idea and potential that stunned Tom now as much as it had fifteen years before.
The place even smelled the same — spilled chemicals, old experiments, stale thought. It was as if the Baker were still here, ruminating in the comfortable back room instead of being dead. Tom shook his head. An artificial’s thoughts were supposed to be his own, but memory was powerful. Here was the Baker bashing a clay pot with a hammer, determined to get at whatever was inside before it was spoiled. He looked up and swore at Tom … and then he was relaxing in an easy-chair, recounting tales of his earlier years as Honorary Professor of Sentience at the university … and then here, pouring a sticky, clear gunge over the back of a dead frog and screaming in delight as its legs spasmed. Memories everywhere. It had been the most amazing time of Tom’s life.
“You’re as good as human,” the Baker had told him, “and better than most.”
Among the mess of apparatus were pieces of equipment that Tom recognised from many of the Baker’s experiments. He didn’t necessarily understand them — not back then, and still not now — but they provided him with a strange sense of peace. To know that the Baker had been busy in
this world was a comforting thought. And to know for sure that his influence was still felt — through Tom, and probably elsewhere as well — went so far as to give hope.
There was a noise at the edge of the room, a rattle of cogs and the lazy squeal of something long-dormant coming to life. Tom stepped back and prepared to utter the exit phrase. He wouldn’t put it past the old scientist to have left some sort of guard in this place, a booby trap to bring the roof down should anyone enter after his death. After all, as he’d once told Tom, there were things in here best forgotten. But then Tom felt himself being spied upon, scanned, a horribly invasive sensation that raised his hackles and drew his balls up into his body. A sheen of light passed over him from head to foot and it seemed to reach inside as well, lighting his internal make-up and delving into his head. He felt a brief flush of abandonment as the scan ended — for a moment he’d sensed the Baker’s attention upon him — but then the discordant rattle and hum of machinery took on an orchestrated rhythm. Some lights flickered on, a coffin-shaped upright cabinet to his left began to shiver slightly as something inside turned over, and several of the Baker’s gophers darted out from beneath the workbench along the wall.
Tom smiled in sheer delight as the little robotic transports hurried about the floor. The scientist had made these things one day when the effort of walking back and forth across the laboratory, searching through cupboards and sifting files had become too tiresome. His casual genius was apparent in their perfection. He could speak his requirements and the next gopher in line would search the lab until it found exactly what the Baker was after. They were remarkable, but their uses were too simple, too convenient for the Baker to be over-excited by them. His efforts had always been directed more left of centre.
No instructions were spoken now, yet still these little wheeled creations busied themselves with some secretive business. And as Tom watched for a couple of minutes the pattern became obvious — everything they searched for and found was taken to the cabinet. They’d disappear beneath the desk beside the cabinet and come out again empty-clawed. There were clicks and clunks and soft sighs from in there. The sounds of construction, and creation.
But Tom felt safe. The Baker, though long dead, would never do anything to bring him harm. Tom had been the nearest thing he’d ever had to a child.
“Baker,” Tom said. “It worked. It worked just like you said it would!” He slipped the rucksack from his shoulder and placed it on a work bench, realising as he undid the clasps just how pathetic it all looked. The Baker had sent him into the world to find love, and here he was returning to the old man’s labs for the first time with a deflated whore over his shoulder and a mad pimp on his tail. “I know it looks a bit strange,” Tom said, carefully opening the drawstring and taking Honey out. She was so light, so reduced. “But you should see her, Baker. Really, wait until you see her when she’s whole again. She’s beautiful. And her mind … she really has a mind, it’s true! Her own mind, her own thoughts, her own sense of herself. She likes finger puppets and dancing and being held.” He frowned. “She’ll have to teach me to dance.”
The cabinet rattled and hissed at the edge of the room, gophers flitting on their unknown missions. One of them jumped onto the bench next to Tom and grabbed a lightning-quick snip of his hair. Tom jerked back and watched it return to the shivering machine, his lock held high in its claws.
He looked down at Honey, a wrinkled mask of herself. He would resurrect her now, and for a while they’d be safe. For a while. But he wanted them to live, to go out together, think together, be together forever. He’d already resigned himself to having to leave the city.
Never once did he let failure enter his mind.
Honey would live again. Nothing else was possible.
He left her on the bench as he went to find what he needed.
Ironically for a scientist, the Baker had been something of a Luddite. His science was his own, so personal and unique to him that in Tom’s eyes it had seemed almost magical. He’d not even had a net point in the laboratory, and even fifteen years ago that must have inconvenienced him so much. Tom only hoped that the scientist’s illicit charging unit still functioned after so long. Of all the illegal units he had seen and heard of this was the only one that didn’t eventually kill its user. The others — sold on street corners and in darkened corners of clubs — worked for a time, but they fused and cauterised their users’ insides, driving them insane, psychotic or both. The irony was that it was a buzz the artificials could not give up … hence the buzzed wandering the streets, artificial equivalents of the human drug addicts. They even looked the same. But the black bags beneath a buzzed’s eyes were caused by burnt blood.
He’d need a lead to connect himself to Honey for the proxy resurrection, and one to plug her into the charging unit. The Baker had kept all his connectors in an old cupboard at the rear of the room, and they were still there now. Tom pulled out a great knot of leads, cables and wires, a tangled web home to many real spiders. He wondered whether they’d become more entangled with time, because at first glance he had no idea how he’d ever be able to part them. But they seemed twisted by design, and in a matter of minutes he’d extracted the two cables he required. He replaced the rest and closed the cupboard door. Strange how neatness was so comforting.
Tom carefully lifted Honey and carried her into the back room, the comfortable place where he and the Baker had used to sit for hours on end talking, discussing, philosophising. The Baker had never been subtle. He’d told Tom that philosophising with what was essentially a robot had been one of the greatest pleasures of his life. Tom smiled now as he thought of some of those conversations, pleased that he’d have a few hours to recollect them in full. He felt in need of some of the Baker’s wisdom.
He took one armchair and placed Honey in the other. The charging unit was built into Honey’s chair. The Baker had done that so that Tom could sit and recharge whilst still conversing. Hungry as he had been to experiment and create, it was the gleaning of knowledge that had been the old man’s greatest love. And he’d told Tom that their relationship was unique in all of history — the more they talked and argued and discussed, the more they knew. It was as if their words reacted in some weird psycho-chemical way, causing truth itself to leak into this room and find a home in their minds.
Tom plugged Honey into the charger and set it to start bleeding power in an hour’s time. Then he connected himself to Honey with the proxy cable, sat back and closed his eyes.
He accessed the net. It took several seconds to find the correct resurrection sites, and he grouped them divisionally so that they could be manipulated in order of importance. He only hoped that Honey had suffered no hidden alterations at the hands of Hot Chocolate Bob. If she had … something other than Honey may result from this.
And if that happened, Tom would destroy her and then himself.
He looked around the room, still swimming in wonderful, safe memories. There were worse places to die.
Honey twitched once as the flow of information began. Then she began to undulate slowly, steaming, a bubbling sound coming from within her pale folds. An eyeball oozed from one socket, rolled across her face and then was hauled back in by a tightening of the optic nerve.
Tom did not want to see. So he half-stood, shifted his armchair and sat back down, staring into the laboratory as he acted as a conduit for Honey’s resurrection.
He reckoned on six hours.
By that time, perhaps the gophers would have finished the pre-programmed task they were executing.
The cabinet rattled and beeped, Honey stank and bubbled, and Tom decided to close his eyes and let memories of the Baker give comfort.
Tom never truly slept. He could turn down and shut off many of his normal functions — and for him that was akin to sleep — but his dreams were sunken thoughts, consciousness on a reduced level, and here randomness crept in.
Dreams were memories as well, and sometimes memories of dreams. That’s why To
m spent six hours thinking of Honey.
Because he was certain he had dreamed of her before.
There were no defined memories in his mind, nothing definitely her, but the whole sense of her was there. It was something he had lived with for a long, long time, a presence in his mind living in shadows, existing in places not yet seen or known or understood. Every thought he had about her now — the way she moved her head, spoke, smiled or frowned — was familiar to Tom. Even the way she’d acted when he had first seen her yesterday, the sex, the smell of her as they’d rutted on the bed … all known.
Hidden, but known.
He wondered briefly if the Baker had been aware of her, but that was crazy. Tom would have known. And the Baker would never have been so cruel as to give him love, only for him to experience it with a sister.
No … plain crazy.
He surfaced from these sunken thoughts from time to time and found everything to be the same. The light had dimmed somewhat and Tom realised that it was night outside, but the gophers were still busying themselves, and Honey still sighed and bubbled behind him.
Maybe the familiarity was a product of the virus the Baker had programmed and injected into Tom mere days before dying. “I’m giving you love,” he’d said, “and one day I pray you may find it.”
For those long years it had always been inside him. And when he had set eyes on Honey, she was everything that love was meant to be.
“Tom?”
Tom drifted back to the surface of his mind. Someone was calling him. Perhaps it was the Baker, because the sounds had stopped from the laboratory, and something was ready.
“Tom … don’t say you’ve gone, not after all this.”
He stood from the chair and spun around, and there was Honey. She was curled into the chair, knees drawn up and feet tucked under her behind, as if hunkered down for an evening with a book and a bottle of wine. But she still looked … wrong. Her skin was tinged blue, her eyes dry and harsh-looking, her hair lank and greasy. She could not move, and her flesh lay in folds around her midriff, pooled on the armchair about her thighs. Her eyelids looked thick and heavy. Her breasts sagged down to her waist, nipples pointing earthward.