by Lamb, Robert
I didn't think anything of it at the time. Fuck, I barely enjoyed it. You run into a girl like that every week and never see their face again. What are they running from? To where do they return? We rarely find out.
But I did see the Vargas girl's face again. It was an 8x10 photograph in the hands of a private detective. I think it was from her high school yearbook.
The ex-cop in the stained corduroy jacket didn't know about the scene we'd filmed. I think it was actually online by that point, but hey, maybe he just doesn't go for the rough stuff. What I'm saying is he wasn't looking for an autograph. He showed up with a whole different agenda in mind.
It turned out that Kristi Vargas had decided to run away from home and follow in the footsteps of her mother -- or at least that's how I assembled the puzzle pieces when that Burbank sleazebag handed me the photo, mentioned the mother's name and rolled out a sob story about crystal meth.
Maybe she turned to porn out of spite, assuming she knew her mom’s sorted history. Maybe it’s just how things fell apart.
"We figured she might try to seek you out," the private detective told me.
Because I'm her father.
No, I don't think she knew.
Or is that some vague hope? Some final shred of decency I attribute to the world?
I don't know.
I barely remember her mother. Like I said, these women disappear and yeah, sometimes they drift back into your life with a child. You know the score as well as anyone, but of course my case was special.
What were the chances, right?
By the look in your eyes, I can tell you've begin to guess the deeper truth here. Go ahead. Try to run. Try to wrestle me to the floor. Brain me with my own bong and call the cops. Hit the headlines! But of course you can't even get up from the sofa, not given the pills I crushed up in that tea you've been downing.
Didn't I tell you my doctor was the best?
There's no "Hollywood porn mutilator" or "serial emasculator" like the media and the authorities so resolutely believe. Or rather, there have only ever been me.
I took the knife to myself on that long woeful night. Out of shame. Out of misery. I'd managed to bring one ounce of innocent possibility into the world, unknowingly, and with so much blind oblivion I'd defiled it.
I went out and got ripped at a bar. I picked a fight with some coked-up biker and got the shit beat out of me. And then I drove home and dug the sharpest knife I could find out of the cutlery drawer.
The actual procedure was over in an instant. Most men would shit themselves if they knew how fragile that bit of flesh really is.
At first I just wanted to bleed out there in my bed. These scars on my throat are from where I almost expedited the process.
But then I had a vision.
In my pain and delirium, I glimpsed the armies of rape marching through a landscape of soot-blackened obelisks. I saw their vile banners and their chained armies of slaves. I saw an endless road lined with the spitted bodies of a thousand screaming women and knew all too well the dark god of their sacrifice.
All that horror streamed up into the night like phantoms rising from an immeasurable grave -- a billion pixilated accounts of masculine ascendancy.
And I immediately saw what needed to be done.
I'm going to go grab the camera and the knife now, friend. I assume you've forced yourself to watch the other short films I've made, right? The ones our ‘mysterious’ serial killer uploads after each crime? The emasculations of our former colleagues Max, Pieter, Bill and Emil are all just a key stroke away.
It's amazing how fast the footage spread on the net -- more amazing still how it never goes away. We feel compelled to view it. We force ourselves to see.
One hundred million hits for poor Emil. And that was before police found the body.
We're chipping away at the walls of patriarchy tonight, friend. We're defacing one more tile in the mosaic of culture, vandalizing the hypersigil till one day the whole image shifts.
I wish I could say you won't feel a thing, but I'm trying to be as honest as possible these days.
The pain will be incredible.
So will the release.
The Children of IVA
The memories and dreams are always the same for Irving Yorke. A spiral descent through unreal architecture. An impression of narrowing. Insane battle cries of "Peel the onion!" ring through every helmet as the ironclad soldiers trudge their way down, layer upon layer, toward the dread heart of the enemy Spherical -- towards the antigrav core that transforms the massive steel artifact into a miniature labyrinthine world.
Yorke is just one amid hundreds, another soft adolescent encased like a fool in blue-black armor, molded and trussed into a soldier of the Orthodoxy. Each breast bears the golden Cross of Salvation Not Yet Obtained. Each gauntleted fist grips an instrument of space-age death: barrels ribbed with electromagnetic coil, gaping muzzles and cruciform bayonets to crown the very torture-phalluses of empire.
The armor. It is the armor makes them strong, a technological marvel of the highest order. It monitors their minds and pumps each body with the necessary toxins, irons the terror from their youthful faces and replaces it with vehemence. A garish war mask obscures each blood-rapist grin. Mythic lions and mustached saints. Cherubim and wolves. Yorke himself wears the face of a bearded apostle 10,000 years dead.
They brandish gore-thirsty rippers, barbed flay knucks and lance rifles that hum desolation. Stick grenades dangle like Paleolithic clubs from their belts. From daggers and ion gougers, the Orthodoxy has draped each Child of God in all the vestments of discord.
They look like lambs trussed for sacrifice. The war masks make them clowns. Osmotic pump implants boil each boy's mind in pharmaceutical bravery. Yet the fear is still there. It echoes up from the cognitive depths, rising through the brain stem like the half-heard squeal of a latrine rat drowning in shit. Children-made-men, the warrior throngs slog through the guts of a great megalopolitan beast. They vanquish layer after layer, "pealing the onion" on their way to the core.
Another lance rifle lights the tunnel ahead, cackling doom.
The alien architecture obeys no natural order. Hallways loop down into new layers of the onion. Every spherical is a maze of black steel arches and diving tunnels. Twisting tubes of blood-red neon summon alien symbols out of the dark and wash every embossed surface in a gem-like glow. Factory-thick smoke from God knows what engine crawls across the ceilings like inverted rivers, engineered by the Lords of inversion themselves.
The Imigrans…
Yorke merely thinks the name and instantly feels fresh chemicals hit his system. Fear must be checked. His phallus swells with blood and strains against the confines of the suit. He finds himself joining in with their war cries again and grins ear-to-ear behind the face of the dead apostle.
Yet deep down Yorke glimpses a truth as old as human madness, the scream of a latrine pit rodent dying in shit and the rock bottom value of self-replicating, bonded carbon. These solider-packed tunnels flow with the quivering flesh of ancient Auschwitz, forgotten Majdanek and Heilongjiang, a vortex of sacrifice, down-down through a black ocean of suffering and into the brine pools of Hell.
***
Twenty years pass so quickly.
An older and in some ways wiser Irving Yorke stares up through the impossibly large atrium. The black buttresses crisscross the gloom like the limbs of frozen giants and the neon is all dead. There's a vaulted ceiling up there somewhere, hidden in the dark.
He has not set foot on an Imigran Spherical in two decades. No one has, not since the Generals of the Orthodoxy learned to breach the outer hulls and flood them with robotic Spider Miners. That last offensive ended the Great War in a matter of months -- turned every last Spherical into a tomb.
Twenty years.
Yet here he stands once more, an expert grave robber come to pilfer an extinct adversary of their forbidden science. He wears a very different costume this time: an overlarge void
suit. Even suction sealed to his body, its baggy shape is robe like and scrotal. The face is his own, visible through a transparent disc. Each exhalation fogs the glass, though only for a moment.
He is alone here, the Djarum Company's lone hire on a mission that violates every Orthodox mandate he's ever heard. Punishable by death. He is here to plunder the old Imigran Spherical for something called the Cask of Years. The Djarum Company provided him only the roughest estimate of where it might be in that maze. Three layers above the Antigrav core, on an island in a great room.
A pilot would have been nice, as would a support crew, but for the most part he prefers to go it alone. No one else would understand. If you didn't actually fight in the Imigran War, it's all myth anyway -- all the suffering, the megadeaths and the meat-grinder senselessness of it all.
Even the most devote Orthodox patriot would miss the true import of the vast atrium. Naturally, the scale and the emptiness of the Spherical would astound anyone, but the neon symbols are all lifeless now. Gloom cloaks everything. Only someone like Yorke would know that a million the hieroglyphic pornographies surround him, covering every available surface like some semantic mold.
Only the Children of Iva can understand.
***
The soldiers of the Orthodoxy march headstrong into the depths as if ensorcelled. The flash of lance fire periodically lashes out. They hear the wail of rippers and somewhere biology is reduced to a mist of blood. They cheer these sounds but very few ever glimpse the enemy. The Imigrans, after all, are as craven as they are debased. Everyone knows it.
The columns pass by embossed iron murals the scale of skyscrapers. Their eyes drink in the details, at first through their peripherals and then through blank stares. They remember everything heard on the ship. The whispers dance through the ranks.
"The Imigrans were once men, you know…"
"Nah, nah, they was never men -- they was made special…"
"They sent 'em out to the stars. They made 'em evolve like wildfire to cope with strange worlds and stranger hardships."
"I heard they don't believe."
"They got their own believes, I reckon…"
"I heard their women are beautiful…"
"They ain't got women!"
"Idiot children!" scream the hoary voices of Orthodox priests, hailing from the safety of the orbiting warship. "You see the work of monsters! Demons born out of our sinful past! They hail back to the end of the Earth Age, before cataclysm and expulsion forced us to put aside our sins! Before we raised the Cross of Iron and set about making the universe right again! We are reclaiming destiny from the clutches of perversion and one day by gawd they'll be none of 'em left!"
Corrected first by words, then by the gears in their suit and the drugs in their veins, the children-in-armor march on.
Their shoulder-mounted lamps cast strange shadows as they pass what humans can only call gargoyles, but what the Imigrans recognize as Aspects of the Manifold Soul.
For how does one contemplate the inner self when one's shell transforms so effortlessly? The Imigrans have a thousand such reflecting gods. They pray to each in meditations. They alter their bodies to alter their minds. They change their souls and in doing so mistake monstrosity for enlightenment -- or so read the old priests from the Seven Books of Salvation.
There were 36 crosses atop the Mount of Golgotha according to Orthodox teaching. Jesu Christi bolted to the Cross of Iron. Mary, pregnant and weeping entwined in the vines of a thorn tree. The Butha stares off serenely, nailed to his Bodhi Tree. Momad is staked to his cross of stone with a meteoritic iron sword. The rest surround them in a forest of crucifixion: Smith, Kooshborn, Hubbard, Opbra, Judas, Dianna, Kopalay, Vemu…
The soldiers worm their way down another black mile of tunnel. More cries ring out as some unseen Imigran dies a swift death. Then they emerge into the great atrium, where the neon burns brighter than anything they've ever seen in the dimly-lit colonies of man. The walls seem made of skyscrapers, all electric-gas emblems and honeycombed stained-glass windows. It's as if they've wandered into the very Heart of City.
A strange euphoria overcomes them all to a man, as if they stand within a great egg about to hatch unto a world of brilliance and light. But then their armor kicks in. The drugs flood their minds and force their limbs. They turn to another tunnel aperture and descended once more in the depths of the Spherical.
***
Yorke is 33 years old now -- the same as the Earth Age savior on the Cross of Iron. Beneath the void suit, he's even scrawnier than he was 20 years ago. Nothing tastes right on prosthetic lips and tongue. Every bite reminds him of IVA.
His arms are ivory-white plastiflesh from the elbows down. He has the delicate fingers of a porcelain puppet and his feet are much the same. By Orthodox mandate, prosthetics can only imbue veterans with sub-human strength. For "nothing Manmade of the body may surpass that which is Godmade."
That's the law. Forget the fact that Spider Miners won the fucking war, or that the "blasphemous" Imigrans didn't employ robotics at all. But so it goes.
Yorke's face is the worst of it. Long sleeves and a pair of gloves can hide prosthetic arms. But his ears? His nose and lips? Forget it. He looks like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces crammed in upside-down.
They're smart implants at least. He can "feel" with them, though only faintly. Just enough to sustain him in his daily movements.
"For nothing Manmade of the body…"
It's the same with his sex organs. The prosthetics look like something chipped from an Earth Age statue. The penis itself is comically small and barely works. The scientists could have given him perfect replacements of course. They could have given him a hand that looks and feels like a hand, or five inches of meat that rises to a woman's touch. But every law in the Orthodoxy prevents it.
And so IVA's Children are shunned. They work shit jobs for shit pay. They turn to crime. They stun themselves with illegal drugs pay the less-picky whores for half-felt mockeries of physical intimacy. Yorke should know.
He closes his eyes, sighs.
Here he is again, tormenting himself with things that can't be changed.
***
IVA comes on slow. That's how the Imigrans designed it.
It seeps through your suit at a snail's pace and the impulse starts as nothing at all. You find yourself licking your lips. If you're a habitual nail bitter, you feel a craving to chew some keratin. Old patterns emerge. Maybe you lick the skin around your lips. A hint of saltiness.
That's when it really starts to take hold.
You've never felt real hunger in your life. Not like this. And the rations in your bag won't do. Only flesh will do. Only your own.
That's IVA for you.
In time, the Orthodoxy would learn to lock their armor tight, to make it impossible to remove in the field. They'd eventually program the suits to sedate infected subjects at the first sign of trouble. But that all comes after Irving Yorke's brush with IVA, when his war-frenzied column shudders to a halt in the Imigran tunnel.
"Why've we stopped?"
"What the hell's happening?"
"Can you see what they're doing up ahead?"
"Fuck no, can you?'
"Do you feel…"
Then a wave of movement washes through the ranks and each soldier fumbles for his helmet's release clutch. There's a hiss of escaping air. Ears pop with the pressure change and they all breathe the thin Imigran air for the first time in their brief lives. They drop their helmets and war masks roll face down over the pornographies embossed in the floor. Then they pull their torso release clutches and each elegant suit of blue-black armor unfolds like a night-blooming flower round a pale naked youth.
Four hundred of the suits unfurl round their tender occupants, like iron maidens collapsing round the miraculously un-pierced bodies of their swallowed virgins. But thirteen-year-old Irving Yorke barley notices the others. He only faintly hears the mechanical whine of opening power armor. He pulls his
sex organs free from the catheter hose, takes the waste tube from his anus and his pulls the pressure pump implants in his arms out by the wires. Hundreds of combat knives unsheathe all around him. Fumbling hands remove bayonets. A few reach catastrophically for rippers.
An IVA victim goes for his facial features first: the nose, the ears, the lips. Never the eyes. Yorke follows through like all the others. He doesn't feel so much as a sting as he slices into his own face and pops each morsel into a drooling, lipless mouth.
He slices off his nipples and gobbles them down like pilfered sausage slices. He plops down on the tiles and barely notices the warm puddle beneath him or the blood flowing down his chest.
All around him, the sound of chewing and ecstatic groans.
The taste is unbelievable.
The larger youths began carving into their love handles and paunch, but Yorke skips straight to the genitals. His movements are those of a butcher: mechanical, precise, without malice. He grabs his flaccid member with one hand and stretches it as if to measure its length. Then he saws into the shaft just above where it joins his pelvis. The blade opens a tiny red mouth there. Blood weeps out and then the mouth becomes an incision. Then it's gone completely.
He pops it in his mouth and turns back to the fleshy sack beneath the hole.
Hazy with blood loss, the mutilated youths go for their toes next. Then they drop their blades altogether and begin gnawing fingers to the bone.
IVA: Impelled Viral Autosarcophagy.
Welcome to Hell.
***
It terrifies him to remember. The taste was all honey and orgasm. Each bite was pure ecstasy. He never felt a tinge of pain.
He remembers how slippery his fingers were, the echoing madness of 400 soldiers feasting in that awful tunnel. Did the Imigrans watch on? Did they walk amongst their preoccupied enemies unnoticed like nurses through a surgical ward? The cracks between the Spherical’s floor tiles became blood gutters flowing only God knew where.
By the time the medical team made it down to save them, Yorke's hands were gone. His groin was a spurting gash. They found him cross-legged amid the madness and death. His forearms were reduced to bloody stumps, jagged radius and ulna bones emerging from each like grotesque dowsing rods.