Halfhead

by Stuart B. MacBride

  Over on the bed—held nice and tight by all those chains and straps—the birthday girl stares at him. She’s still wearing a little badge saying: ‘I AM 18’, even though it’s not really her birthday any more. She stopped sobbing fifteen minutes ago, now she just trembles, whimpering something over and over behind the gag.

  He doesn’t say anything, because she wouldn’t understand. No one ever understands.

  Sometimes it makes him cry, but not today: today is a day for celebration. That’s why he’s let her watch.

  He slips himself free, patting the other woman on the head as he does so. The lucky soul is almost gone—one eye swollen and bloodshot, a string of dribble hanging from her slack mouth. He’s filled her up with as much life as he can, and soon the angels will come and take her to their bosoms. Another soul that he has saved.

  He smiles and winks at the birthday girl, tucked up all nice and cosy on the bed. It’ll be her turn soon enough. He’s got more than enough life to go round.

  Will groaned. He shifted his weight, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt quite so much, but he could barely move. Cramp lurched up and down his body, pausing every now and then to kick him in the kidneys.

  He prised one eye open. Bright light. Pain. It felt as if someone was ramming a red-hot poker into the socket. ‘Fuck…’ It was like the worst hangover he’d ever had. He closed his eye again.

  Someone slapped him. Hard enough to fill his mouth with the taste of blood.

  Will coughed, retched, spat a mouthful of hot copper down his own front.

  Slowly the room lurched into focus. A wall of muscle was standing over him, dressed in a grey-black jumpsuit. The kind with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves.

  ‘Aye.’ The bruiser was rubbing his right hand, talking into a throat-mike. ‘That’s ‘em baith conscious now. Ye’d better let Himself know.’

  ‘So, you’re not dead then.’

  Will inched his head around, slow and careful, just in case it fell off. Emily was strapped into an interrogation chair next to him, still dressed in her eclectic-tatters outfit. A fresh bruise covered her left cheek, her lip was swollen, and her expression was murderous.

  ‘Where are we?’ It came out as a croak.

  ‘No idea. By the time I woke up we were in here. The restraints weren’t as good as these ones…’ she flexed against the straps, going nowhere. ‘But they learned fast.’

  Will swore. Winced. Then looked around the room, trying to figure out what the hell they were going to do now.

  It was a dimly lit, circular room, empty except for Will, Emily, the two interrogation chairs, and the man-mountain. The wall was one continuous mirror that wrapped all the way around, their distorted figures reflecting back at them. There would be cameras and scanners on the other side of the glass, recording everything, right down to their blood pressure and pupil dilation.

  So it was official—they were fucked.

  But at least they weren’t dead yet.

  Will spat out another sliver of blood. ‘How far did you get?’

  ‘About a hundred yards.’ Emily’s scowl turned into a smile. ‘There’s at least three of them won’t be walking home tonight.’

  ‘Two of them,’ said a cheery, educated, mid-Atlantic voice, ‘may never walk again. Not without some serious surgical intervention anyway.’ The newcomer stood in a doorway that hadn’t been there the last time Will looked. The man was backlit, turning him into a silhouette against the painful glare. ‘Gotta admit: I like a woman who knows how to take care of herself.’

  Emily’s eyes narrowed. ‘Blow it out your arse!’

  ‘Ah, touché.’ The silhouette folded its arms and leaned against the doorframe. ‘Well, now we’ve got the witty repartee out the way, I wanna know who you are and exactly what you’re doing at Sherman House.’

  Silence.

  ‘OK…let’s try again. We know you don’t live here, so what are you: Newsies? Hope-Heads? Malkies? Don’t tell me you’re Flatworlders, that would be too disappointing. No? Neo-Christian Jihad?’

  More silence.

  The man shrugged. ‘You know, I don’t have to do this. If you like, we can just pump you full of chemical cooperation. Save everyone a load of time: I get what I need to know and you get moderate-to-severe brain damage. No skin off mine, is it?’

  Will cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know who you are, but I can promise you we’re not journalists, religious freaks, enforcers, or Terra-rists.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Your girlfriend’s too spunky for all that “space is for the Martians” bullshit.’ The silhouette cocked its head. ‘So what are you then?’

  Will threw the question back: ‘What are you?’

  ‘Nope, sorry, that’s not the way it works. You answer my questions, or you end up taking your meals through a tube. So one last, and final, time: Who are you?’

  Will shut his eyes. Tell the truth or lie?

  Given the setup here, they’d be monitoring everything right down to his pupil dilation and skin temperature. If he tried to lie they’d know about it before he’d finished the sentence. And then the interrogation drugs would come out. Moderate-to-severe brain damage—there was no way he could do that to Emily.

  He brought his chin up. ‘William Hunter: Assistant Network Director for Greater Glasgow and Central Section. This is Lieutenant Emily Brand, Rapid Deployment Squad Team Lead.’ He tried to put a bit of steel into his croaky voice. ‘Now exactly who and what are you?’

  But the man in the doorway wasn’t playing.

  ‘If you’re a Network ASD, what you doing poking round Monstrosity Square without armed backup? Mind you, considering the mess your girlfriend made of Davis, McLean and Simpson, maybe you didn’t need it.’ There was a pause. ‘Why Sherman House, Mr Assistant Section Director?’

  In for a penny: ‘Last week an SOC team was called out to flat one-twenty-two, forty-seventh floor. Their scene-of-crime scans show the place covered in blood, but when I went back there on Monday it was stripped clean. No bloodstains; just an old, tatty flat with faded wallpaper.’

  ‘You came all the way down here because someone tidied up?’

  ‘Two of the bodies we collected from Sherman House this week tested positive for VR syndrome. We need to know if there’s another outbreak brewing.’ It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. The machines wouldn’t get suspicious.

  ‘I see.’ The figure took a step back and the doorway faded, leaving nothing behind but mirrored glass. That fake American accent echoed around the room, ‘Don’t go anywhere, will you?’

  And then Emily hissed at Will, ‘Why the hell did you tell him who we are?’

  ‘You want your brain fried with chemicals?’

  ‘You have no idea who he is! Terra-rists, Neo-Christian Jihad, even Gaelic Nation Separatists for fuck’s sake. They didn’t know who we were, and you just handed them a Network ASD for a hostage!’

  Will nodded at the mountain of muscle in the dark-grey jumpsuit. ‘Look at him: he’s not a fanatic, he’s military. This whole place stinks of Black Ops.’

  She looked at him. ‘That doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.’

  Ten minutes later, the dim room blossomed into full light, sparkling back off the mirrored wall. A door popped open somewhere behind them, and that same transatlantic voice said, ‘Angus, please unfasten our guests.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The man-mountain started on Will’s restraints.

  A figure wandered into view, hands in the pockets of his sharp, bottle-green suit. Late twenties. His hair was mousy brown and wavy, his eyes unremarkably blue. The kind of face you wouldn’t remember clearly when you were questioned by the police. He walked with a pronounced ‘clip clop’, on a pair of dark brown Cuban heels that added an extra inch-and-a-half to his height, and even then he only just scraped five-foot-eight.

  ‘Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr Hunter, but we gotta be real careful about who’s wandering about down here. Someone kicks something
off and “boom”; we got ourselves a full-blown riot.’ He stuck out a hand. ‘Ken Peitai, Senior Social Engineer, Ministry for Change.’

  They shook, then Peitai handed over a plain business card.

  Will pointed at the sergeant untying his feet. ‘Since when does the Ministry for Change need military backup?’

  ‘Since Sherman House.’ The man in the bottle-green suit smiled, eyes twinkling. ‘They keep a lid on things: neutralize flare-ups before things get out of hand, tidy up afterwards, make sure it doesn’t explode like it did during the VRs. Couldn’t do our job without them.’

  Peitai helped Will to his feet. ‘See, that’s why the apartment you visited didn’t look like the SOC recording. We erased the crime scene when you’d done with it, scrubbed the place from top to toe.’

  Will winced, pins and needles making him hobble. ‘The wallpaper had stains printed on it.’

  ‘Yup.’ Peitai watched the man-mountain trying to unstrap a glowering Lieutenant Brand without getting anywhere near her. ‘Our psych boffins figure if we leave the place spotless and smelling of paint, the next load of occupants will know something horrible happened in the flat before they got it. Imaginations run riot, they start to obsess, and next thing you know they’re out in the corridors blowing off steam by kicking someone’s head in. So we print on a bit of grime; make the place look lived in. So far it seems to be working.’

  Will nodded—it actually made sense. Which meant that all the sneaking around he’d done had been a stupid, and dangerous waste of time. Dragging Emily down here, getting them almost killed…

  Moron.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Sounds like a good plan.’

  ‘You know,’ said Ken, ‘there’s so much Spontaneous Violent Aggression down here we’re pretty sure the original Virtual Riots weren’t actually caused by them shutting down the VR channels after all. That was just the trigger. And when you got so many people living on top of each other in connurb blocks like this, there’s plenty other triggers to choose from.’ He started to recite facts and figures, throwing hands about to emphasize various points.

  The mountain of muscle in the grey jumpsuit finished untying Emily and retreated to a safe distance, watching as she stretched out her hamstrings and flexed her fists. Now she was a ‘guest’ instead of a prisoner, she outranked him, but Will got the feeling the big man just didn’t want to end up being the fifth person she’d crippled that day.

  Ken stood at the door to the mirrored room, holding it open. ‘You guys want a tour?’ He tipped a thumb at the corridor outside. ‘We don’t get a lot of visitors—you know, keeping the whole thing under wraps—but I’d love to show you round?’

  Will nodded. Still feeling like an idiot. ‘Thanks.’

  The place was a rabbit warren, the walls painted a cheery shade of yellow and decorated with abstract works of art. Various coloured lines ran along the floor beneath their feet, occasionally branching off as they came to a junction.

  ‘We reckon about half the guys living in Monstrosity Square got some degree of VR syndrome,’ said Ken as they stepped through a set of double doors into a control room. One wall was given over to a bank of monitors, stretching from floor to ceiling, each screen showing a tiny flat like the one Kevin McEwen had killed his family in.

  ‘Got monitors in about a third of the apartments. We’re getting the rest wired up, but it takes time, you know?’ He slid his hands over a control plinth, making the screens jump from flat to flat. Most of the residents were plugged into VR headsets, their gloved hands waving about in front of them, making things happen that only they could see. No one down here was rich enough for a cranial implant.

  ‘That’s about the only thing thirty percent of them ever do: all day, every day. We had to make Comlab insert food and toilet breaks into their programming, because the poor sods would end up with malnutrition and bladder infections. The remaining seventy percent spend anything between four and twelve hours plugged in. Why live in the real world when you can live in a full-immersion fantasy instead?’ Ken sighed. ‘It’s not the VR that’s addictive, it’s the escape it represents.’

  Will watched the rooms and their inhabitants come and go on the screens. ‘What happened to the McEwens?’

  Ken grimaced and traced a figure of eight in the air—every monitor changed to show the same thing: Apartment 47-122. He reeled it back and figures flickered in reverse through the place.

  Will saw himself and Emily in their tatty rags…then the flat was empty…then there he was again, poking around just before Stein died…then empty again…and then it was the clean-up squad, stripping off the wallpaper, painting the walls with blood. Then Brian Alexander and his Network team dropped the chunks of dead body back where they’d found them. And finally the victims came back to life, made whole by the assault rifle in Kevin McEwen’s hands.

  Ken twisted the control back to ‘PLAY’.

  Kevin raised the gun and blew his wife and children apart.

  Ken hit pause. ‘By the time the response team got up there it was too late. We’re still trying to find out how he got his hands on an MZ-90. I mean, Jesus: the damn thing’s an antique.’

  He waved his hand over the plinth again and the screens flickered back to real time views of the different flats. Then Ken ushered Will and Emily back out into the corridor.

  ‘Primarily we’re trying to find out what really triggered the VRs,’ he said as they followed a green line in the floor. ‘Eleven years on and we still can’t pinpoint an exact cause. Compressed urban habitation is obviously a key factor, but if we can find out what’s actually causing their brain chemistry to change, making them go off the rails, do terrible things…Well, we could make a huge difference to these people’s lives.’

  A pair of technicians came out of a door marked ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!’, nodding a greeting at Ken as they wheeled a trolley away down the corridor.

  Will watched them go. ‘Any success?’

  Their guide gave Will a lopsided smile. ‘Not as much as I’d like. But we’ll get there.’ He pushed through the door the technicians had come from, leading Will and Emily into a medium-sized laboratory, lined with expensive-looking bits of equipment. The walls in here were the same happy yellow as the corridor, but the paintings had all been replaced by digiboards and cell diagrams.

  A handful of serious-looking men and women were dressed in light-blue lab coats, bent over scopes, scanners, gene sequencers, and test tubes.

  Ken pointed at a woman manipulating a big computer-generated holo of a human brain, the familiar red and yellow bands clearly visible in the frontal lobes. ‘We’re also working on methods to reverse the changes VR syndrome causes. I figure that if we can make a cure airborne and combine it with a heavy-duty sedative, we can just flood an infected building through the ventilation system. Knock ‘em out and fix ‘em up at the same time, before they can hurt themselves or anybody else.’

  Ken clapped one of the scientists on the shoulder. ‘It’s a tough job, but if anyone can do it, it’s these guys.’

  The man in the white lab coat grinned.

  Will waited until they were back out in the corridor. ‘Why didn’t you inform us you were running trials down here?’

  ‘Ah.’ Ken shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask my boss that one. Me? I think the fewer people know half of Glasgow’s probably still got VR syndrome, the better. That gets out there’s going to be panic, hoarding, mass hysteria, civil unrest…’

  Will had to admit he had a point.

  They followed a blue line in the floor, Ken going on and on about psychological empowerment and how it was still possible for the people crammed into Glasgow’s connurb blocks to have a better quality of life.

  But Will wasn’t really paying attention. He had his mind firmly fixed on a long shower, a carry-out, a bottle of wine, and a change of clothes. His gaily-coloured tatters were beginning to smell. He’d had enough of feeling, and looking, like an idiot for one day.

  They�
�d reached a pair of frosted-glass doors marked, ‘SHUTTLE STATION’.

  Ken ushered them through to an unassuming platform, the concrete tunnel stretching off into darkness on either side. ‘Well, this is where I have to leave you folks. I gotta re-home about three dozen families before the end of the day. Fight broke out in the lobby this morning. Starts out as a tiny scuffle—some kid gets his testicles mashed—and next thing youknow, boom: six dead, twenty seriously injured. If we hadn’t got a team in there pronto God knows how many more would’ve been hurt.’

  He called for a private car, then offered Will his hand.

  ‘Nice to meet you Mr Hunter; sorry we had to zap you back there.’ They shook. ‘Give me a shout next time you’re coming down: we’ll have lunch and I’ll introduce you to some of the guys.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  Emily didn’t offer to shake Ken’s hand, but he didn’t seem too put out, just waved goodbye and left them alone on the deserted platform.

  She scowled at the closed doors. ‘You buy all that horseshit?’

  ‘I’ve heard dafter things. And if they can come up with a cure for VR: can you imagine it?’

  ‘That wee shite is up to something.’

  Will shrugged. ‘Everyone’s up to something.’

  He could hear muffled voices in the corridor behind them: a man and a woman. Gossiping, discussing their caseloads, telling dirty jokes. He couldn’t really see them through the frosted glass, just two blobs of light and darkness going about their day.

  Will turned his back on the doors. ‘Have I told you the one about the two nuns in a hydroponics garden—’ The growing roar and buffeting wind of an approaching shuttle drowned out the rest.

  Emily stepped back from the platform’s edge. ‘SO THAT’S WHY THE CUCUMBER SANDWICHES ALWAYS TASTE FUNNY?’

  ‘YOU’VE HEARD IT?’

  The tunnel was growing lighter, the stanchion lights flickering on as the shuttle car decelerated out of the gloom. Green and shiny, like an exotic beetle. It came to a halt right in front of them.