Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  Snot started to dribble out of Latimer’s nose. But he was too frightened to move, or break the Sheriff’s cold and evil stare.

  And, finally, the fear became so great that Latimer started to babble truth.

  I realised that Latimer wasn’t afraid of getting hurt: he was afraid that the Sheriff wouldn’t approve of him. It was skilful work. In five minutes flat, the Sheriff had ripped out this man’s soul and left it flopping on the ground.

  “Look, I want to help,” whined Latimer. “I really do!”

  “So – help.”

  “There’s, I guess, a rumour, do you know it?” Latimer babbled, “About the House of Pain.”

  I had already hypothesised he was a regular customer there. Latimer’s access to the House’s scuttlebutt was a partial confirmation of this surmise.

  “What rumour?”

  “Like, you know, there’s normally a waiting list,” said Latimer, “for limb and organ replacement. It can take months, years sometimes, to get new body parts. If you use rejuve, it’s even slower. Ten years to grow an arm back, with the shit rejuve we use on this planet.”

  “We know all this,” the Sheriff growled.

  “My point is: if you go to the House of Pain, if you can afford their entrance fees, you can have your heart’s desire. New eyes, new limbs, new breasts, new cock. It’s all part of their service. Some of the masochists, they like it the medieval way. You know?” Latimer licked his lips, clearly envious at those more perverted than himself. “That means,” he clarified, “they’re kept in a dungeon for weeks, then hung, drawn and quartered, and disembowelled, and blinded with hot pokers. But at the end of all that, Hari’s people put these sad-fuck punters back together and they send them home to their wives and husbands as good as new. Now think about it. How do they do that? Where do they get all those fucking limbs, and organs, and eyes?”

  I looked at the Sheriff.

  “Fair point,” said the Sheriff.

  “Where are we going?” the Sheriff asked.

  “Someone I want you to see,” I told him.

  “Hey, I know you!” said the green-eyed freckle-nosed girl sitting behind the desk. “How come – I mean – I thought you, like, died?”

  I tried to shrug nonchalantly, but with little success, so instead I ignored her question. “Your name is Macawley,” I told her.

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  “You have no Christian name.”

  “I’m not a Christian. Macawley is my first and only name. Hey, that was a fun piece of banter. What the hell is it this time?”

  “This is Alexander Heath’s father.”

  Macawley looked at the Sheriff. “He never told me his father was—”

  “We didn’t get on so well,” the Sheriff conceded.

  “Macawley was a friend of Fliss Hooper. Your son’s girlfriend,” I said to Sheriff Heath.

  “Yeah. I know about Fliss Hooper. Her sister was that whore,” said the Sheriff, spitting the word.

  “Fliss was my friend,” said Macawley.

  “So the robot told me.”

  “Cyborg,” I corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  I persisted: “Tell him,” I said to Macawley, “about Fliss and Alex.”

  “Um? Sorry? I think I’m supposed to be on duty here?”

  “This is Galactic Police business. Tell him.”

  Macawley laughed.

  And then she frowned. The frown changed her face utterly. She was no longer a brusque receptionist; she was a vivid, emotional, passionate, beautiful elf.

  “It’s hard to – I don’t know what you – Well, like, they were kinda, good together?” she said.

  “How did they meet?” I asked.

  “We had a party,” Macawley said, tentatively, in a “what-the-fuck?” kind of tone.

  “Where?”

  “Here. At the hospital.”

  “Who approached whom?”

  Sheriff Heath was starting to glare now. “What’s the fucking point of—” he began, but I silenced him with an imperious gesture.

  Macawley frowned again, a “recalling the past” frown. And, as she spoke, smiles and wry looks flickered fast and briefly across her face: “Fliss was drunk,” she said (smile). “That was a sight to—” (wry look, half-smile). “When she was drunk, she was never mean or rude, you know, she was just vivid, and people loved to, you know, be around her” (big smile). “Anyway, she did the approaching, I guess” (wry look). “Or maybe—”

  I replayed her facial expressions in slow motion in my mind’s eye, so fascinated was I by them: in barely a second and a half, she had flickered out a smile, a wry look, a frown, another smile, growing into a grin. And then Macawley laughed, and it was a sound like wine glasses colliding.

  “—she, like, fell out of her dress, and he caught her.”

  “With respect,” said the Sheriff brutally, “what the fuck are we wasting time here for?”

  “Did she love him?”

  “Hell yes.” Macawley’s grin became a joy to behold. “He was such a sweet little bastard. Cheeky. Fearless. Funny. He told stories all the time. He pretended his father was a big-time space smuggler; we had no idea he was just a crooked Sheriff, no offence, um. They were great with each other, like – finished each other’s sentences. Sometimes they’d even start each other’s sentences. It was like, they were, you know, not exactly telepathic. But connected.”

  “He ever talk about his mom?” said the Sheriff.

  Macawley looked at him very seriously: anxiety and doubt and affection flickered across her face now, as she realised that the Sheriff was a grieving father. “No.”

  “She used to beat him. So I broke her jaw and threw her out.”

  “He never told me that.”

  “I raised him myself. Working shifts. Cooking for him. Getting him dressed for school. He was a straight-A student; I used to pay him to do his homework. We used to go shooting when he was eleven, twelve.”

  The Sheriff paused, remembering, and Macawley waited patiently until he was ready to continue.

  “Then,” the Sheriff continued, “things got hard at work. Political. I worked extra shifts; I had a lot of sleepless nights. I got myself a child-minder. Worse thing I ever did. ’Cause I lost him. Bitch was a hard callous cow who made my boy love her more than he ever could of loved an old bastard like me. So I lost him. My own boy. It was like a stranger broke into the house. He used to called me names, and disrespect me, and look at me, in that kinda way he had. That sneering look. I didn’t know how to – Alex kept telling me I fucking hated him, and that I was crushing his – why the fuck am I telling you this?” The Sheriff turned to me. “What in the name of all goddamn hell are we doing here?”

  “I’m re-motivating you,” I explained. “So you will be willing to continue taking your revenge.”

  The Sheriff blinked, with shock and dawning pain, as the cruelty of my strategy became apparent to him.

  “What revenge?” said Macawley.

  “That’s official police business.”

  “There was an organ-theft scam,” said the Sheriff. “My son found out; that’s why they killed him.”

  “That’s what I always – feared,” whispered Macawley.

  “Good to meet you girl,” said the Sheriff, curtly.

  “You too, Sheriff.” Her flicker of expressions contained a hint of empathetic love for this battered, shattered man.

  “Let’s go,” said the Sheriff.

  We were halfway down the corridor when I felt a hand clutch my arm.

  “Wait,” Macawley said. Now she was so close, she seemed astonishingly short, barely five foot high. And she peered up at me with anxious, determined, soulful eyes.

  “What?”

  “Maybe I can help?”

  A phantom hospital needs real doctors, real nurses, real equipment.

  “I’ve run a check on every employee of the City Hospital. They all work full shifts. None of them can be moonlighting,” I explained.r />
  “Bullshit. No one works full shifts,” Macawley told me.

  We were sitting in the café opposite the hospital. Macawley was buzzing with energy. The Sheriff was grim-faced, and I surmised that he was preoccupied with regrets about his failures as a father, and also, no doubt, consumed with contempt for my superb manipulative skills.

  “All the employees work full shifts,” I contradicted. “This information is in the hospital database. I loaded that database into my own database when I was Version—”

  “Yeah but, shut up, you dumb fucking robot head; I just told you – no one works full shifts,” Macawley insisted, brutally. “Life’s too short. We have robots to do our dirty work. Most of the equipment is robot-controlled. So people clock in and clock out, and the rest of the day, they pretty much please themselves. I work a four-hour shift because I like it. But I know doctors who haven’t worked here in months, yet they’re still logged in the computer files as present, and they still get paid.”

  I felt a spasm of rage at the sheer sloppiness of all this.

  “I don’t see how it’s possible,” I argued, tautly. “Every human presence is monitored by hidden cameras. You can’t cheat that.”

  “You can cheat anything.”

  “She’s right,” said the Sheriff.

  “How?” I argued, and so Macawley explained, first in geeky technical detail, and then in broad philosophical outline.

  For this was, she told us, a city of lies. No one was where they were supposed to be. Most people didn’t do the jobs they were registered as doing. The Belladonnan Computer, observing SN Government guidelines, exercised rigorous surveillance over every citizen, but the data that it received was almost always false.

  I knew that criminals could subvert the city’s surveillance systems – else, how could they break the law? – but it came as a shock to realise that the entire planet was engaged in relentless duplicity. Computers were hacked, cameras were subverted, false images of hard-at-work employees went into the computer database.

  It all seemed like a recipe for chaos. However, because of the tireless skill of its robot doctors, the City Hospital more or less muddled through. And the gifted human doctors and nurses did make a huge difference to the standard of medical care when they were actually there.

  But most of the time, they were elsewhere.

  “This doesn’t help us,” I argued. “It doesn’t narrow the list of suspects. It just means anyone can be to blame.”

  “Look at it another way,” said the Sheriff. “Where could they hide a hospital?”

  “I’ve made a virtual search of every inch of the city,” I said. “But if the camera data is corrupt – then I’ve been wasting my time. The phantom could be anywhere.”

  “I may have an idea,” said Macawley.

  After she had explained the idea, there was a sober silence.

  “Yup, that could work,” said the Sheriff, eventually.

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “It’s dangerous,” I advised.

  And Macawley laughed, and her green eyes glittered and she opened her mouth and her teeth were sharp points, and she hissed, and then she roared a perfect roar.

  “Yeah, like, bring it on,” she snarled.

  “That’s my girl,” said the Sheriff, awed at her flash of ferocity.

  She licked her palm, and growl-purred eerily.

  “You’re part cat-person, I take it?” the Sheriff added.

  “Oh yeah,” admitted Macawley. “On my mother’s side.”

  As we planned the assault on the phantom hospital, I realised: this was madness. We were outnumbered. The gangs had literally thousands of gunmen and gunwomen willing to do battle with us, and their weaponry, antiquated though it was by the standards of a modern military fighting force, was more than ample to defeat most attackers.

  Furthermore, the Sheriff’s official deputies weren’t going to join him on a suicide mission. They were all lucratively paid by the gangs.

  And I still didn’t have sufficient evidence to justify calling for a robot battle-force. My first hypothesis had proved to be totally wrong, so I now needed considerable evidence of just cause before I could once again call for backup.

  So, for the moment, all we had by way of an invading army was a cyborg Cop, a hospital administrator, and an over-the-hill corrupt lawman. Our chances of success in this rescue mission were approximately very low indeed.

  However, despite this pessimistic assessment of our chances, I realised that my sensory field was heightened, my reflexes were augmented, my thought processes were accelerated.

  Never had I felt so alive.

  “My mother was an addict,” Macawley admitted. “Highs, Lows, Blues, needles in the brain, sex, alcohol, she overdosed on everything she could. She did some bad things when she was drug-psychotic; child-killing, that kind of thing. She was pregnant with me when she came to Belladonna. I survived the fifty-fifty in the womb. My mom committed suicide when I was five. She left me a trunk full of song lyrics, very autobiographical. Her whole life was there, but nothing rhymed and there wasn’t no fucking rhythm, and she never wrote the music to go with the songs of her life.”

  We were in Macawley’s loft apartment. It was evening. We’d spent hours going over every detail of Macawley’s plan, anticipating every eventuality.

  And now, we were tired, and the story-telling had begun.

  “You could come home,” I said. “To one of the Solar Neighbourhood planets.”

  “They wouldn’t have me. I’m trash.”

  “Your mother was trash. You’re not.”

  “Hey! Was that what robots call a compliment?”

  “You could make a new life,” I persisted. “All our planets are safe places. You can raise kids. No one steals or rapes or cheats or commits murder. The streets are clean.”

  “Sounds like hell to me,” muttered the Sheriff.

  “We have democracy, and liberty, and happiness.”

  “I got two out of three of those,” goaded Macawley. “Who the fuck needs democracy?”

  “The fact of it is,” the Sheriff said to me, “your godforsaken fucking paradise only works because you dump your human garbage in places like Belladonna.”

  “What else,” I argued, “could we do with scum like you?”

  “I always knew,” said Macawley, “there was something wrong. Something dark.”

  The Sheriff nodded, sharing her regret.

  “I had a best friend before Fliss, a girl called Gina. She used to go hunting in a girl gang, starting fights. Nothing serious, no one ever true-died. But by the time she was fourteen she had scars all over her face and body and she thought she was supreme. We all thought she was the queen of cool. Then she vanished and no one ever mentioned her again. I spoke her name to my stepdad and he beat me and locked me inside his empty body armour for a day. I thought I was going to die, I couldn’t move, I was so scared. But afterwards I never mentioned Gina.”

  Macawley’s eyes flared with anger: “Someone took her, didn’t they? Took her and harvested her organs. I guess they figured she was no loss.”

  We all pondered her story for a while.

  “I’ve lived a thousand years, give or take,” said Sheriff Heath.

  “Indeed? I would have estimated you to be older than that,” I observed, and the Sheriff glared.

  “I’ve lived through war,” continued the Sheriff, “and anarchy and tyranny, and now I live in hell. But the fact is, you don’t live as long as I’ve lived without telling lies, and living lies, and being a fucking lie. Hell, every kid knows there’s evil on this planet. But you just think, hey, let it be, and you might be lucky, you might just manage to live a couple of decades more.”

  “I get that,” said Macawley.

  “Fucking pathetic,” raged the Sheriff.

  “Hey, I get it, I get it.” Macawley touched his hand and squeezed it, and surprisingly, the Sheriff smiled at her.

  “I remember,” I said, in a confident
tone, “many cases. Many adventures. Many planets. Oh, I could tell you stories of the things that I have done, and the places I have seen!”

  There was a long silence.

  “Why don’t you then?” goaded Macawley.

  I pondered this.

  “Because, I must postulate, I don’t know how to do so.”

  “How come?” said the Sheriff.

  “Because,” I explained, with a tinge of sadness, “all I have are facts. Facts about events. Facts about arrests. Facts about shootouts, and betrayals, and violent deaths. I have died so many times, and each time it feels like – I have no words for it – I have died many times, and that is a fact.

  “But stories? I have no stories.

  “Only humans have stories.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said, and it began.

  Macawley was dressed to kill, or be killed. She wore street rags – distressed cloth wrapped like bandages around her naked body, baring flesh and tattoos. Her hair was high and spiked, her green eyes shone, and her face and body tattoos shimmered with bioluminescent glory.

  “Very feral,” I said admiringly, and Macawley snarled, and I glimpsed her forked tongue, wet with spittle.

  We caught the lift down to the ground floor. The Sheriff was wearing flybiker’s gear, to conceal his full body armour. Macawley walked out into the night, and I followed. And the Sheriff mounted his flybike and took off, then followed us both from above.

  The street bars in the Hot Zone were raucous and riotous as always. Waiters on hoverboots served bottles of potent hooch to wildly dressed revellers. There were no cars, no pedestrians, just partygoers filling every street and alley. Macawley muscled her way in and downed six Solar Flares in a row and then she told an augmented Warrior to go fuck himself.

  A bottle was smashed in her face, but Macawley got in a few powerful punches before she went down. I stood nearby, watching impassively as Macawley was kicked and stomped. An ambulance appeared about ten minutes later, and Macawley was loaded in.