Five hours later, Kim emerged from her underground hideout and declared herself the Queen of Lawless City. I watched as she appeared in holographic form in every saloon and gambling joint in the city, blazing with radiance and energy, and called on all present to lay down their guns.
And I watched, as they did just that. I saw how Kim made the warring forces swear allegiance to her. And I heard the cries of loyalty and love that echoed around every bar and nightspot in Lawless City.
I marvelled: for I knew that this love was true, and ran deep, in the hearts of all those who now followed Kim. For, of course, I possessed no secret device to confer the gift of empathy; nor, indeed, had such a device ever been invented.
Yet my words had empowered Kim. And her own rich, beautiful seductive personality did the rest. All who saw her surrendered to her charisma, and worshipped her.
And loved her.
But her power did not work on shadows. Two days later, as she entertained guests in the salon of her palazzo-brothel, I saw the smile on Kim’s face ebb when the shadows appeared, and their swords slashed, and she was brutally slaughtered. For the few surviving Gill’s Killers were bound to obey their dead master’s orders – to ensure that none of the other gang bosses would ever inherit his empire.
Kim died screaming, and regretful, as blades sliced her body into shreds.
Finally, a dagger was plunged through her frontal lobe and it killed her, not instantly, but slowly, eating away at her consciousness over five or six painful minutes, cursing her with time enough to mourn her own demise.
And when her screaming stopped, all that remained of Kim Ji was her warm cadaver, and a lingering memory among those who’d known her beauty, and extraordinary spirit.
And still the killings persisted, as the surviving henchlings and capi vied for power, and died for it.
Saloons were burned; the Dark Side was evacuated; innocent citizens were trapped in vice dens by warring gangsters, and had to plead for their own survival.
After a week of gang war, the streets of Lawless City were red with blood, and littered with ripped flesh, all the way from the Central Square to the borders of the Dark Side, and beyond.
I morphed my features, and shrank my height, and as a shorter and a squatter man I walked through Lawless City and saw the havoc I had wreaked. Never before had the gangs fought so bloodily; never before had so many true-deaths been recorded on Belladonna. It was the darkest day in the city’s history.
Abraham Naurion, the recently elected President of Belladonna, was the only gang boss to survive the carnage. He appeared on TV holos and called for peace, but no one heeded him. Naurion was, by now, a visibly haunted man; his words held no conviction.
I drank a whole bottle of Golgothan Malt one night, with no effect; I pissed the contents out as whiskey pure enough to drink.
I wondered if I should assassinate President Abraham Naurion, but found no just cause. There was, even now, no evidence to connect Naurion with the murder of the medics, and I could not plead self-defence. I wanted very much to kill him, but I knew it would be wrong to do so.
And yet, of course, I had done far worse things, committed far more immoral acts, during my time on this planet.
I remembered the Killers I had shot in the battle at Billy’s Saloon. They were evil scum; but even so, I had no grounds for killing them.
I remembered Harry Baker, the security guard in Grogan’s Casino. After his demise, my database had informed me of Harry’s numerous terrible crimes and character flaws; but even so he did not deserve to be killed by me.
I remembered Billy, who I had betrayed, then slain.
And I remembered Billy’s father, Dooley Grogan. Version 43 had goaded him into drawing his gun, then killed him as he was attempting to pacify his men. That was, I concluded, a shabby trick no matter which way you looked at it.
I remembered Sergeant Aretha Jones. Version 44 had tricked her into arresting Sandro Barumi in his heavily defended home, purely so that her life would be put in jeopardy, so that 44 would then have just cause to execute the Pimp. But that was wicked and reckless endangerment of a fellow officer! What was 44 thinking of?
I realised that I no longer understood the underlying principles of my moral code. I was sure that I was Good and not Evil; but I had also become, I feared, morally capricious to a dangerous degree.
Was I a defective model? Or were we all defective, all the Versions of Galactic Cop Model X? So should I therefore delete myself, by firing an explosive bullet through my chest, into my own cybernetic brain? Logically, I concluded, I should do just that.
But I did not want to.
I did not want to.
One night I turned up at the Blue Note, and found it had been closed down. I walked from club to club, until I finally discovered a tiny dive where Blind Jake and Pete Mullery were performing to a weary audience of war survivors. They sang ballads and blues, and their music grated the audience’s soul with its brutal grief. Jake sang about a world of desolation and despair. Pete sang about hope and love and joy, and how he would never find them again.
Pete didn’t recognise me, even though I was at one of the front tables. But from the way he cocked his head, it was clear that Blind Jake had sensed my presence.
“Death is with us, he sits here among us, he looks like a human, he’s going to kill you, man, death is with us, tonight,” Jake improvised, in a song about two lovers, and at that point I got up and walked out.
My mission, I decided, had not been achieved. I remained confident in my hypothesis that Hari Gilles and his Killers had murdered the medics and Version 43, but I had obtained no evidence to substantiate that belief. And I had destroyed the gangs, but at the price of ceaseless gang war and anarchy, which had caused the deaths of large numbers of innocent bystanders.
It was now apparent that I hadn’t cleaned up the town, I had simply made it even more lawless.
I formed a conclusion: I had failed, utterly, and totally. I had made things worse than they had ever been before.
“Death is with us, he sits here among us, he looks like a human, he’s going to kill you, man, death is with us, tonight,” Jake had sung.
And I knew what he meant, and knew it was true. And I felt an intense, powerful emotion:
Shame.
THE HIVE-RATS
The Sand-Rats had always loved to burrow. It was one of their favourite activities, along with fucking and fighting.
Their species had evolved at a time when their planet was blighted with searing heat for eleven months of the year. Their ancestors had lived most of this time beneath the surface of the planet’s deserts. Once a year the sand bloomed and a trillion ant-sized creatures emerged from their deep sleep and swarmed and gorged, then retreated beneath the sands again.
As the climate grew milder, the little ant-sized creatures became larger rat-sized creatures, then became larger still, growing to the size of puppies. These new creatures had by now evolved into a Hive-Rat, a collective mind. And they – or rather it – still loved to spend most of the time beneath the planet’s surface. The Hive-Rats burrowed and they excavated, and shat, and fucked, then burrowed some more to create vast caverns deep below the surface of the sandy wastes.
And now the Hive-Rats were travelling through space via transdimensional wormholes. These wormholes allowed them to leap instantly from planet to planet across vast distances; and each time a wormhole was created it lingered in space, as a virtual pathway, or hyperburrow.
The Hive-Rats were living almost constantly in fast time now, so they had untold millennia in subjective time in which to explore the new worlds they encountered, and study, and think.
But they did none of these things. They merely sought out human settlements, and destroyed them.
In the course of their travels, they discovered that there were humans in every corner of the universe, but most of them were to be found in a small region in the Virgo supercluster.
But rather than focusing
on this area, the Hive-Rat invasions were random in nature. They leaped across the expanding universe from one end to another, until they were able to travel in the regions beyond which there were no stars, as yet. And occasionally they toyed with the idea of lingering a while in one of these places, in slow time, to see what they might see.
But curiosity was always vanquished by rage. And so they journeyed back into the heart of the expanding universe and destroyed, in all, another twelve human planets.
All this while, however, the humans were growing subtler, and even more powerful. They invented new weapons, new kinds of forcefields, they even invented invisibility machines that allowed them to “hide” entire planetary systems.
But on every such occasion, the fast-time Hive-Rats were able to devise a means to circumvent and thwart the human defences. Once, it took them a hundred thousand years – in subjective Hive-Rat time – to create a counter-weapon to defeat the ingenious death rays and space-distorting fields that protected the humans’ planetary system. But in “real” time, that amounted to no more than a twelve-hour hiatus; then the humans’ planet exploded.
The twelfth planet they destroyed was called, in human language, Cambria, and it had a long and distinguished heritage. Admiral Monroe had spent a tour of duty on Cambria, in Doppelganger Robot form; it gave him a bitter pang when he saw Cambria’s sun turn supernova.
But by now Monroe was reconciled to being part of an infinitely powerful superbeing. He thought of himself as the pre-eminent warrior king of the Hive-Mind. And he believed that the success of their campaign of destruction owed much to his own military genius.
But sooner or later, Monroe knew, they would reach Earth. And that encounter would undoubtedly cause him considerable moral turmoil. For the Admiral had friends, and family, and an ex-wife still living on Earth. And the ex-wife, Clara, had borne him a dozen children, all of whom still lived in the Sol System. And all but one of the Monroe children had numerous children of their own; and these, Monroe’s grandchildren, were cherished and loved by him – a rare sentimental attachment on his part.
And by now of course, after centuries away from Earth, he was bound to have accumulated large numbers of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren. And all of them too would be destroyed, when the Hive-Rats arrived.
Monroe worried about this: would his loyalties be conflicted, when it came to murdering his own family and friends?
Or would it simply feel wonderful to be so, quite literally, omnipotent?
THE COP
Version 45
Three days after the massacres and murders had come to an end, the river of blood that ran through Lawless City had dried, like a scarlet oil slick. Flies swarmed around it.
Never before had I seen its like.
There was, I perceived, a mood in the air that night, despite the horrors that had passed; a mood of excitement and hope.
A group of girls had been partying all night but as they walked home they were still sober and they were talking about politics. Their grandparents had known democracy, but these girls had grown up in a society ruled by an unelected Mayor, in the pay of criminal gangs.
I strolled the quiet streets, listening to the girls’ chatter as well as eavesdropping on thousands of other conversations in the city and across the planet, as was my custom in these dismal days.
For, by this means – ceaseless aural and visual surveillance via my robot dragonflies – I was able to gauge the mood of the populace. President Abraham Naurion had made a new speech declaring this to be the first day of the new Belladonna. Never again would criminals hold sway, he claimed. Peace and democracy would come to this planet, he promised. Out of the fires, a phoenix would be born! Or so he prophesied.
It occurred to me that I had somewhat neglected the fact that Belladonna was in the throes of a Revolution. While the gangs had been fighting, Naurion had taken control and was now creating a new society. Was he, I wondered, for all his many flaws, sincere in his idealism?
Once I would have mocked such an idea. Now – I was not so sure.
I carried on walking, listening intently to the loud mob of party girls. Then two men passed me, lost in discussion about a rumour that pressure was being put on the President to create a Parliament, where rival political parties could argue their different views. “That’s great news,” argued one man – “it will make our system a genuine democracy!” “Yes but surely,” argued the other man, “Naurion knows what is best for us, and should be left to run things as he pleases?”
I marvelled at the fatuity of their analyses.
Coincidentally, one of the party girls I was eavesdropping on had mentioned this same rumour just a few moments earlier. And her friend, a rather loud and bossy-sounding girl, was convinced that the leader of the Parliamentary Movement was a woman. However, no one could remember her name – Belinda something? [Belinda Cartwright, I thought, supplying the name and the biog to myself, frustrated at these youngsters’ pathetic lack of grasp on the political situation.] But all the girls vowed to vote for her! They wanted a woman in power, someone more of their own generation, someone who understood. And they all hated the President and what he stood for!
A group of boys passed by these party girls, and the girls wolf-whistled and laughed and the boys grinned. And then the boys passed on, fancying their chances retrospectively, while the girls scoffed among themselves: what kind of desperate women would go for that useless shower of—
And then two flying cars swept past, shooting sheets of plasma fire on to the road, aiming at a man on the opposite walkway. The plasma missed its target and the girls were engulfed. The boys screamed, and some ran away, but one ran back to save the girls, and he too was engulfed in plasma fire and burned.
They were all so very young, I mused.
I stepped over their charred and still whimpering bodies, and continued on my way. Paramedics would deal with the injured; there was nothing I could do.
I surmised that the killers had been attempting to assassinate a rival gangster. I wondered who it was.
But I did not pursue the attackers. It was not, strictly, within my jurisdiction. And in any case, I did not have the heart for it.
For I had killed so many, and caused the deaths of so many more. And I was finding it increasingly hard to motivate myself.
I went back to my hotel room, and watched what was happening in the city via my dragonflies. And through their many images, I built up a portrait of a city in crisis. Muggings. Murders. Rapes. Drive-by shootings, on a regular basis. The city was, even now, in a state of anarchy; the cops were powerless to intervene. And there were no longer any gangs to enforce the law.
I sipped a black coffee. It was lukewarm, the caffeine had no effect on me, and I took no pleasure from drinking it. But the alternative was to drink whisky, which, as I had learned, was even more futile.
Things hadn’t, I decided, worked out as I had hoped. I had genuinely believed that once the gang bosses were all dead, a new harmony would arise. Instead, weeks later, there were still lynchings and domestic murders and riots. Billy Grogan’s saloons had been looted. Hari Gilles’s Houses of Pain continued to function, but they were now run by the dominatrices. The whores took over the brothels. The nightclubs functioned on a “pay what you like” basis. The casinos were organised by the croupiers, who manipulated the odds to be even more in favour of the house, but otherwise changed nothing.
And the gang killings continued, as the dregs and scum of the city’s gangs continued to exact vengeance for endless half-remembered insults. These were the last twitches of the wounded, dying beast.
I went to see the President.
“We’re offering an amnesty,” said President Naurion, “to all former felons, such as yourselves. But first, you have to forswear your bad old ways, and pledge to be honest citizens.”
Five hundred former gangsters stood shoulder to shoulder with me; and all of us accepted the President�
�s strictures. We proclaimed our repentance, pleaded regret for past sins, and vowed to make a fresh start.
President Naurion was uncompromising. He blamed the gang war and the subsequent citizen riots on the dictators back on Earth. All the deaths were caused by Solar Neighbourhood Government, he claimed! All the violence in the city was the consequence of the actions of the dictators on Earth. Earth and its lackeys were to blame for everything!
The man does, I found myself thinking, rather to my own surprise, have a point.
I was waiting in the shadows of her living room as she opened her front door. I did not breathe, so she could not hear me. She latched and primed the door, to make it invulnerable to anything short of a nuclear missile, then Aretha walked into her living room and subvoced the lights.
“Hello Aretha.”
I was impressed: she didn’t betray her shock. But she turned to look at me and there was a gun in her hand.
“No chance,” I smiled, and she shot me.
I caught the explosive bullet in my palm and crushed it.
“What are you doing here?” Aretha demanded angrily.
I started to weep.
“What have I done?” I said to Aretha, heartbroken, as tears streamed down my cheeks.
“I don’t know. What have you done?” Her tone was cold; her contempt was like a dagger in my heart.
“All this. All this. My fault,” I sobbed.
Aretha knew who I really was: a Galactic Cop in the body of mercenary and gangster Tom Dunnigan. And she knew, of course, that I had murdered Billy Grogan, and launched the Gang Wars which had caused the deaths of thousands of innocents.
“You fucking bastard cyborg. Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” she said, tauntingly.
I wept myself dry. Guilt consumed me. And I longed for her to hold me, and comfort me, but she would not.
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