by Tim Lebbon
“You’re alive!” Tom said. She smiled weakly and he moved to her side, reaching out to touch her forehead. It was slick and too cool.
“I feel unfinished,” Honey said.
Tom made sure the lead still joined them to the buzz unit, closing his eyes to ensure that the net connection was still there. Then he sat on the arm of the chair and put one arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him like a doll, kissing the top of her head even though it dismayed him to do so. “But you’re awake now,” he said, “and I’ll stay here with you until you’re ready.”
“Where are we?” she asked weakly, and he told her.
“Stay quiet and get some rest,” Tom said, “you’ve got a way to go yet.”
“Fuck quiet!” Her voice was low, but full of life. “We’ve got a lot of getting-to-know-each-other to do, you and I. Tell me about you. Tell me … tell me what it’s going to be like for us, and where we’re going to go. Tell me how happy we’ll be when we get there.”
So Tom sat there, holding Honey’s shadow as her resurrection was completed, and he told her the things she wanted to hear. Curiously enough, they were all the things he wanted too.
They left at midnight. Honey held onto Tom’s arm as she walked across the laboratory, looking down at her feet, concentrating hard on each and every step. The lights were stuttering now, as if losing their will when they realised that their guests were leaving, and Tom was terrified that they’d fail before he and Honey reached the door. He’d find his way out, he knew that … but right now he wouldn’t welcome the dark.
The gophers had been inactive for hours. The cabinet was quiet too, but it was a loaded silence, like a pause between breaths or the stillness after a scream. Tom kept glancing at the cabinet as they approached, and again as they passed by, wondering what was in there and whether, by the Baker’s weird machinations, it was meant for him. The scanning he’d felt upon entering may have kick-started some long dormant programme in the laboratory’s terminal, a gift for message for him. A final testimony to the Baker’s genius.
They walked on, and Tom felt the cabinet standing behind him watching them go. It was the centre of the room, the heaviest point, a black hole drawing everything to it, including his thoughts. Good sense was sucked in too.
At the exit door, Tom paused and Honey rested against the wall. “I’ve got one thing to do before we go,” he said.
“You’re destroying the place, aren’t you,” she said.
He frowned at her. “No.”
“Oh …” She did not elaborate, and Tom did not push her. Not now. Later he may ask her what she thought the Baker really meant to him. But for now, he had scant minutes to snoop around. Perhaps, deep down, he didn’t want to leave this place of safety and nostalgia so soon.
The cabinet had the dimensions of an upright coffin, but it was made of metal and warm to the touch. Tom ran his fingers around its edges, wondering if there was some way to open it easily, and then he thought of the gophers. They’d been darting in and out beneath the benching next to the cabinet, so he knelt and peered into the shadows.
There was a hole through which a gopher could slip inside, but that was it. Nothing more. No way for him to get in, nor to see what was there.
Unless.
He scouted the lab quickly, feeling Honey’s gaze tracking him. “Not long,” he said.
“Don’t worry. I like watching you work.”
“I’m not working.”
“What’s your job if it isn’t to save me?”
Tom wondered again just how much Honey had changed during her shutdown, and then he spotted what he was after: a small mirror fixed to the wall above the wash basin in the corner. He tried to prise it from the concrete, failed, punched it instead. It shattered into the sink and he selected the largest shard. He grabbed a second piece as an afterthought — he’d need light — and then went back to the cabinet.
All done with mirrors, the Baker had often muttered as he performed some astonishing new scientific feat. Now Tom used mirrors as well. And for the briefest, darkest, almost human moment, the black magic he had never believed in faced him down.
He could see the pale hue of new skin even before he slipped the mirror into the hole. The leg was sheened with fine hairs, and they seemed to thicken and darken as he watched.
“What is it?” Honey asked.
Tom did not answer. He could not. Because he’d angled the second mirror to catch some light and bounce it up into the cabinet, giving brief illumination to what stood within, illuminating nothing … because Tom could not understand.
Why or how or when … he did not understand.
The naked man dipped its head and looked down at him.
He was looking at himself.
Paler, thinner, not quiet all there … but himself. There was no real expression on the face. That made it worse. The light was feeble, but Tom could see some details he’d rather not. Like the fact that the simulacrum had no real eyes, only milky white jelly balls in its sockets. Or the way its hair seemed to be forcing itself through the scalp, twisting and waving like a million baby snakes, hushing against the inside of the cabinet as if the splash of light had agitated it.
Tom dropped the mirror shards and scrambled back on his hands and heels, leaving bloody hand prints on the floor.
“What is it?” Honey asked again, concern tingeing her voice.
“It’s me,” Tom whispered very quietly. “It’s me…”
“What?” Honey hadn’t heard, and now she was walking unsteadily across the laboratory and reaching down, swapping roles as she helped Tom stand and lean against the oak desk. “Tom … if it’s that bad we can leave and shut it in.”
Tom looked Honey in the eyes — they were full of life again now and their golden hue had returned, as mysterious and bewitching as before — and he realised that he didn’t want to tell her. And he didn’t need to.
That one crazy glimpse had seemed to lessen his own existence. For a second he’d felt … insignificant.
He was an artificial, after all.
“Do you love me?” he said.
Honey frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, you know, I’m a plastic bitch and I hear the word ‘love’ a lot … but then you did rescue me. And you have resurrected me. So yes, I suppose I do.”
Tom was crestfallen.
Then Honey laughed and kissed him, and she held his face in her hands so that he couldn’t look away. “Of course I do! Now, can we leave please? There’s a place I need to go.”
“Where?”
“The Slaughterhouse. Best club in town.”
He was dumbfounded. Didn’t she realise just how deep the shit was they were wallowing in? “Honey, we need to leave! Hot Chocolate Bob … we have to leave the city, get out, maybe up into the mountains —”
“There’s a friend I have to say goodbye to. And it’s near the city walls.”
Tom looked around at the cabinet as it started to hiss. It was venting an opaque gas from a port in its head. He realised how this had been the first place he’d thought of bringing Honey for safety … and he wondered how much of that decision had been a subconscious wish to say a silent, final farewell to the Baker’s memory. Was Honey’s request so different?
“We have to be quick!” he said.
Honey kissed him once more, and then stepped back so that he could open the door.
The thing in the cabinet had shocked and disgusted him. Some of the Baker’s equipment must have corrupted and gone bad, kick-starting the creation of some meaningless experiment as soon as he’d entered the rooms. The instant he and Honey found themselves out in the open Tom uttered the locking phrase, praying that he, nor anyone else, would ever have to go in there again.
And he bid the long-dead Baker a fond, final goodbye.
They hurried away from the business estate. Tom thought of the simulacrum of him trapped down there forever, without benefit of memory or knowledge to keep it sane. He remembered the Baker sayin
g that some things in those rooms were best forgotten. Now more than ever that was true. So he put a block on the image and memory, and he and Honey moved on.
The streets sang with the sounds of night. Sirens echoed between the tower-blocks like carrion cries in desert canyons. The flood of chopped humans turned the city into an extravagant nightmare, a place of evolution bastardised by enforced mutation. A thousand possible futures walked the pavements, waving their wings, whistling through gilled throats, scurrying spider-like or walking tall.
“He’ll look for us,” Honey said. “Hot Chocolate Bob won’t give in. He’d have spread the word.” She ducked into a boarded-up shop doorway as a feisty gang of teenagers ran by, trailing a sense of threat behind them.
“Going to a club is crazy!” Tom said. “Who is it you need to see?”
Honey turned to him and held his face. “You sound jealous,” she said, smiling.
“I would be if others like us could love,” he said.
“What?”
And then Tom realised for the first time that, as much as Honey’s feelings for him were a surprise to her, the reason behind them would be more so. He should tell her. But he was afraid.
How to tell her that her love was caused by a virus?
“Nothing,” he said. “And I’m not jealous. I’ve never felt like this before and I know it can’t be false. You and I … we’ll endure. If we’re given the chance. And that’s what frightens me, the idea that we won’t even be able to try. If you’ve been to this club before, it’s one of the places your pimp —”
“He isn’t my pimp anymore,” Honey said, quietly but firmly.
Tom shook his head. “Yes, but you know what I mean.”
“The man I’m going to see … he’s my only client that Hot Chocolate Bob never knew about.”
Tom was confused. A lover? A sex partner for a hooker? Or was the Baker wrong? Had love existed for artificials all along, and only he, Tom, had never experienced it? The thought was chilling and belittling. He felt the world moving out from him, and Honey seemed to recede, forever beyond his reach, their separation confirmed by an awful, unbelievable truth.
“And you have to say goodbye?”
Honey nodded slowly. “He’s a human. His name’s Doug Skin. There were lots, hundreds, but he was kind, Tom. Not the first time, then he was just like them all — he fucked me, beat me, came in me and left. But the second time he’d changed, he was different. We never had sex again. Ever. And he said it was because he’d fallen in love with me.”
“Do you love him?” Tom asked. Such complexities in four short words. The answer would make or break his existence.
“No,” Honey said.
“Did you, once?”
She frowned. “No. I respected him, and I was grateful to him, and I treasured him. I still do. But no, I never loved him, even though he wanted it so much. It was never like that.”
“Can we trust him?”
Honey merely nodded once, and Tom thought it was because she was angry at the question.
More people passed them by, a couple of grotesque manacled women stopping to hiss and laugh and piss at their feet. One man — chopped so that he was over eight feet tall — strode over and whipped the women around the necks and faces with his extended phallus, as long as he was tall and festooned with knotty lumps.
“Hope they’re not going to this club of yours,” Tom said as the three freaks sauntered away, laughing and crying together.
Honey raised her eyebrows. “Well, they’re going the right way.”
Tom sighed and followed, grabbing Honey’s hand and enjoying the contact. They were both dressed in black, and really they didn’t seem that out of place on the streets. But if Hot Chocolate Bob did have important contacts, and money to buy up-to-scratch surveillance equipment, then they would be found. No question. Chances were, if he worked in association with regional drug barons or the illicit chop surgeons, he would be tracking them now with a hijacked police satellite. Recognition software would have picked them up within minutes of leaving the Baker’s unit.
Tom looked behind them, up, across the street, feeling eyes burning into him from every angle. He’d never felt so exposed, even though they were lost in a crowd. And each time he turned to Honey she was looking at him, smiling, eating him up with her resurrected eyes and holding his hand tighter every time.
“What?” he asked, half-smiling.
“I don’t know. I’m just enjoying what’s going on, loving that fact that I love. Maybe I caught life from one of the humans who had me.”
Tom thought about that, about all the living stuff she’d had pumped into, onto and over her. In reality it wasn’t life she’d caught, but something even less quantifiable and understood.
Yet again, he wondered whether he’d ever tell her the truth.
And that’s when they were seen. Freedom, so fleeting and precious, was lost to them in the space between breaths.
Tom felt the instant change in atmosphere. One second they were part of a crowd, two black-clad night walkers with plenty of secrets to hide, and that was their camouflage. Next second, all attention was on them.
When he turned around and scanned the street behind them, he saw why.
“We’ve been found!”
Three people emerged from the steaming mouth of a subway station and ran straight at them. They were chopped. They had elongated legs to help them move faster, at least two extra arms for multiple weapon implementation, and their bodies were mostly hidden by a sleek, shiny protective coating. They looked like man-sized beetles.
“Mercenaries,” Honey said. “One chance. Run with me!”
The crowds parted as Tom and Honey sprinted along the pavement. For a second Tom wanted to mingle with them, pressing away from the streetlights and melting into the dark. But he knew that would be pointless. The mercenaries had them now, they were locked on as surely as if they were all chained together, and the only chance of escape was to outrun or outmanoeuvre them.
And that was hopeless.
The street had quietened suddenly, all conversation and laughter and singing smothered by terror. The only sounds now were their own pounding footsteps and the regular, incredibly fast slap-slap-slap-slap of the mercenaries’ hydraulically driven feet meeting concrete. The hunters closed in quickly, echoes bringing them even nearer. Tom knew that they would be caught within seconds.
He glanced at the people pressed against walls or huddled in alleys, but no one would meet his eye.
“Where?” he gasped, and Honey reached behind her and grabbed his hand, squeezing. Hours ago she had been shut down and deflated, and now here she was running for her life from three mercenaries, people so drastically chopped that they were more mutant than human, more machine than mutant. Her new charge must be draining quickly.
It wouldn’t matter. Within a few seconds they would have either escaped — and Tom had a hunch now as to where Honey was leading them — or they’d be dead.
At least their deaths would be quick. The mercenaries were trained killers, and from what Tom knew of them they had no time for torture or melodramatic acts of vicarious vengeance. If they were hired to kill they killed, in the most effective and economic manner available.
They’d probably crush his skull under their feet to save on ammunition.
As if conjured by his panicked thoughts, a machine gun opened up behind them. He’d never been near to gunfire, and the sudden cacophony shocked him, the white-hot kiss of bullet trails across his skin sending him into a state approaching panic. Bullets thumped into the ground ahead of them, spinning shattered concrete slabs along the street. More impacted the facades of shops and buildings, and Tom was sure he saw indistinct shadows flailing and spinning, heard the surprised cries of innocent victims. The gun paused for a moment, and as Tom wondered why something smashed into his ankle, taking his feet from under him and sending him across the concrete on his face.
“Grenade!” Honey hissed. She grabbed Tom,
dragging him clumsily across the pavement and into the doorway of an old hotel.
It stank of piss and stale booze, and the pain from Tom’s foot brought everything out clearly, even in the weak streetlight: the crumpled newspapers damp beneath him; Honey trying to hug the two of them into one; the smell, the stench, a miasma of everything that could show fear.
There was a surreal moment of utter quiet in the street before the grenade exploded.
They were protected from most of the blast by the reveal of the inset door. The ground shook, windows shattered and rained glass across the street, bricks burst into stinging powder, people screamed, the air was sucked from Tom’s lungs by the blast, his outstretched legs were shoved into the brick wall, bringing more white-hot agony. He heard Honey moaning beside him, and he reached for her and cried out joyously as she squeezed his hand twice, a message that could only mean I’m fine. He squeezed back as he stared to get to his feet.
“We may have a second or two,” he said. His voice sounded distant, eardrums ringing. The echoes of the blast still reverberated along the street, and now he could hear more cries, moans and screams of pain or shock.
And fading in as the explosion passed away, the slap-slap-slap of the mercenaries’ continuing pursuit.
“Come on!” he hissed. “Wherever you were going, go!”
Honey stood, rubbed dust from her eyes and lead them back out onto the pavement.
The feeling of stepping into full view of the mercenaries was terrible. But it was their only chance. If they remained in the doorway the chopped warriors would be on them in seconds, and then it would simply be a matter of a bullet to the back of the head or a quick spray from a flame unit. At least in the open there was a chance. The dust and smoke from the blast gave a false sense of concealment, but Tom knew that the fighters’ senses were paring in on them even now, radar and sonar, heat detectors and biometric scanners picking them out of the chaos.