Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  For Vishaal had been one of the killers of Alexander Heath. Together with four other anciens called Lucas, Georgi, Shona and Gunther.

  Vishaal had also explained their motive, which was a malign one. And through a combination of what he told me, and what my database already knew, I had found out the shocking truth about Alexander Heath.

  However, several weeks had passed since I had made this discovery. And I had been dreading the moment when I would have to tell the Sheriff what I knew. The real story of what happened to his son; the truth about why Alexander had to die.

  And, because I had been dreading that moment so much, I delayed it. For all these weeks I had been prevaricating, fearful that the Sheriff would withdraw his support from our venture if he knew what I knew.

  I was being a coward, I knew, and that was out of character for me. Cowardice was not, and never had been, part of my programming.

  However, still nursing my deceit, I walked through space until I entered the ancien space station.

  “You’ve done a good job, General,” said Vishaal.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re clearly a natural criminal, and a born killer.”

  “Those, I’m afraid, are my only talents.”

  “That’s not,” said Vishaal, deadpan, “what Livia tells me.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “We are anciens. We have no friends.”

  “Then we are merely lovers.”

  “Come,” said Vishaal. “I have a present for you.”

  Danny was a pretty eight-year-old with tousled hair, and a flair for karate. He was in a white gi, his face fiercely focused, going through his kata.

  “Nice kid,” I said, looking at the holo image.

  “We’ve chosen him for you.”

  “Chosen him?”

  “As your vessel.”

  “What vessel?”

  “You do not need,” said Vishaal, “your current clumsy body. It’ll serve for now, while you are working on the planet’s surface. But if you want to live with us, in the spires and in space, you need a fitting vessel.”

  “This is my new body?”

  “When Danny is sixteen,” said Vishaal, “we will gouge out his brain and give you his body. Our gift to you.”

  “I’m honoured,” I said, biting back my rage.

  “This is our Holy Grail,” said Vishaal.

  It was not, in fact, I noted, a Grail; it was an interferometer. Its presence here surprised me, for it was a truly archaic device: a light source sent twin beams of photons through tiny gaps, and behind the gaps, an interference pattern was projected. And this striped pattern was, of course, the simplest and most potent manifestation of a quantum-wave-particle duality state. For instead of existing in a finite space, and appearing as a dot of light on the other side of the hole, the photons were smeared between many possible states.

  This shadowed bar was the clue, I mused, to the unreality that lies beneath reality.

  “And now look,” said Vishaal, and dimmed the lights, and pressed a switch.

  Stripes appeared on the ceiling above, and on all the walls, and on Vishaal’s face.

  Vishaal raised the lights.

  “This is our quantum weapon.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, though by now I did.

  “By manipulating the nature of quantum reality,” explained Vishaal, “we ensure that the photons of light continue to go through the gap. But they also go, equally as often, above the gap. And to one side of the gap. They go sideways, and upwards, and in all directions. In the next room, this light shines too. It’s a simple enough tool, but it’s the basis for our new physics.”

  “You can do this to human beings?”

  “Imagine I am a photon,” said Vishaal. “I am here, but also there, and also there, and every place.”

  Vishaal vanished and my vision became a blur. I peered at the blur. I saw a million, a billion, a trillion Vishaals.

  Then “reality” returned.

  “Nice trick,” I said.

  “There is no trick,” said Vishaal. “Nor is there any technology. We achieve the Quantum Zen state purely through the power of consciousness. It has taken us a thousand years to perfect this. Now, we are gods.”

  “How do I do it?”

  “We will teach you.”

  “Argo,” said Livia smiling, and I leaned across, and kissed her sweet young lips.

  “I’ve invited,” said Livia, “some companions to join us.” She blinked and the curtains pulled back and two beaming young women and a shy blond man appeared. “You can do with them,” Livia added, “anything you want. Sex. Mutilation. Kill them if you want; we have robot cleaners, and these will surely not be missed.”

  “That’ll be a thrill,” I said, my heart as cold as ice.

  Space was black, all around me; the stars shone like dust.

  I walked back to the lift, which would take me back to the hotel, which would lead me back into my “real” world.

  I wondered how humans could be so very evil.

  Then I remembered all the things I had done on Belladonna. The many people I had killed, the many innocents whose deaths I had caused.

  So was I evil? Or was I simply a tool? A badly programmed machine, who need not feel guilt?

  I did not know what emotion I should feel.

  That made it worse.

  “What have you learned?” asked the Sheriff. His tone was hostile, impatient. It had been a month since I first infiltrated the anciens’ regime, and we still had nothing to show for it.

  I realised that today was the day I would have to tell the Sheriff about his son. The prospect filled me with Terror.

  “The quantum weapon,” I told him, “is not a weapon. It is a state of mind.”

  “A psychic power?”

  “A power, of some kind. It is controlled by thought alone. I cannot – explain it any more.”

  “And that’s how they killed my son.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “There were five killers. One of them I have met: Vishaal.”

  “And why? Did you find out why?”

  I hesitated. “I’m not sure,” I said eventually.

  The Sheriff peered at me. He read the duplicity in the silence. He started to swear, but then stopped. There was pain in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “You’ve been lying to me, ain’t you?”

  I was silent.

  “I didn’t know you could lie.”

  “It was an effort,” I admitted.

  “Tell me the truth,” the Sheriff said angrily.

  “It’ll hurt.”

  “Lies hurt more.”

  “Are you—”

  “I’m sure. Tell me.”

  So I told him all I had learned about Alexander Heath. An idealistic doctor, who discovered an anomaly in the hospital records: an ill patient who had never been admitted but whose family believed she had died of cancer on his ward. And so he investigated. And an ancien came to see him. A grave-faced silent child.

  “Your son worked for the anciens. He didn’t uncover a conspiracy, he was part of it.”

  Vishaal had told me the story, with some amusement. It was an example of how the anciens liked to work, Vishaal had said. They didn’t destroy people, they recruited them.

  “They recruited him when he was thirty years old. He spent nearly fifteen years murdering teenagers and gouging out their brains and replacing them with ancien brains.”

  Alexander Heath had laughed at the ancient-looking child. He could not be intimidated, he could not be bribed. So why should he help these creatures?

  “Why the fuck would he—?” the Sheriff said.

  “They seduced him. Told him he was a god.”

  Vishaal had walked with Alexander Heath through the streets of Lawless City and showed him its hidden secrets. Its i
nvisible cable cars that moved at one-tenth of lightspeed. Its population of ancient children. He took Alexander on board a cable car and he experienced for himself the sheer joy of moving so fast you cannot be seen.

  “Alex would never—”

  And then Vishaal had taken Alexander to his penthouse in space. And there, Alexander saw for himself the power of the anciens. He learned how very old they were. He learned of the terrible things they had done. And he was offered the promise: you too can be like us.

  “Everyone falls for it. They are supreme seducers. It’s what they do. It’s their only joy.”

  However, Alexander had said no.

  “Alex was a killer?”

  But the next day when he woke up, the world was a black and evil place. His beautiful girlfriend was a foul and vicious bitch. So he slapped her around, and she left and he never saw her again. And the patients he treated were scum; he hated them, he wanted to kill them. And so he did kill them. He killed one hundred patients in the course of one week until Vishaal turned up again and said, “Stop, you must stop; you’ll be caught. You are consumed with envy and regret, and hence full of rage. But join us, and you will feel no envy, and no regret, and whatever crimes you commit, you will never be caught.”

  “And so Alex became,” I concluded, “a mass murderer.”

  “Goddamn,” said the Sheriff, in utter dejection.

  And Vishaal had looked into Alexander’s eyes, and everything changed. Now, Alex saw the world as a bright and radiant place. He saw the beauty of Vishaal. He looked into a mirror and saw his own beauty, his young unlined skin, he saw himself as he would be if he were a child of sixteen. And the patients he treated were still slobbering beasts, but he saw the beauty that could be achieved by killing them. And so he started working shifts at the phantom hospital. Each day, he attended Hari Gilles’s phantom hospital and he dissected twenty human beings and removed their organs for sale. And every now and then, as a particular privilege, he would be sent a beautiful and healthy child, and he would sedate the child, and remove the child’s brain, and replace it with an ancien brain. And then the child would walk again.

  And every day he felt more than human; his blood sang; his limbs were strong; nothing discouraged him; he was incapable of being unhappy.

  “But then Alex fell in love.”

  I had learned from other sources that love had proved part of the story, but I had deduced from other data that love had proved to be more powerful than the glamour with which the anciens had sprinkled Alexander. And, under the influence of love, Alexander Heath saw the world as it really was, and himself as he really was. And he was plunged into despair, and he called Vishaal and said he was planning to kill himself, but before that, he would reveal all to the authorities.

  “Alexander told Fliss Hooper what he was doing. Fliss told her friends, Andrei, Jada, and the others. They confronted him. Alex broke down crying.”

  “And how the fuck do you know all—”

  “Vishaal told me. I asked, and he told me. For they have done to me what they did to your son: they have seduced me, and recruited me. They have made me adore them.

  “Except, because I am not human, it doesn’t work. I still see the world as it really is. I see the anciens as they really are.

  “Except sometimes, I don’t. Sometimes, they are like gods to me.

  “Sometimes, I worship them.”

  “Worship those fuckers,” the Sheriff snarled, “and I will surely kill you.”

  I replayed it often, that conversation between Alex and his friends: a dialogue that had been recorded on a hidden surveillance camera, and was then preserved in the ancien database, and hence now existed as a subfile in my memory.

  I could see it, and did see it, every day, every minute of every day, in a continuous loop. I could not get the data out of my mind:

  “What is this, a fucking lynch party?”

  “Alex, please.”

  “We know what’s going on Alex.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “This isn’t what we should be doing. We’re a new generation, Alex!”

  “Look I’m just—”

  “You’re just what, just killing patients?”

  “They’re scum. Whores, junkies.”

  “They’re still people. You know what you’re doing is wrong.”

  “Yes! Some of them are just twelve-year-olds, Alex, still in secondary school. You can’t kill children!”

  “Even the bad kids, the gangers – Jeez, Alex, they don’t deserve this.”

  “So what are you going to do? Turn me in?”

  “No. You’re our friend. We want to stand by you. We’ll go together to the authorities. You can testify in court.”

  “They’ll execute me for what I’ve done.”

  “Not if you give evidence against the people who employed you.”

  “Alex?”

  “What do you say Alex?”

  “Are you with us, Alex?”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’m in. But—”

  “But what?”

  “You gotta understand. These people – I work for – I—”

  “Alex?”

  “What’s wrong Alex?”

  “Fuck Alex, your face—”

  “Your eyes—”

  “Your hands—”

  “Alex!”

  “What is this? What are those—”

  “Shadows? Shadows, moving?”

  “I can’t—”

  “This can’t be—”

  “Help me!”

  “Help me, please!”

  I had seen it all many times. I saw Alex’s face distort and explode, and the particles of face float through the air and be sucked into the lungs of the other young idealistic medics. I saw their bodies twist and contort. I saw limbs being ripped off and turned into silver balls smeared with blood and faeces. I heard the screams.

  Then the image fuzzed, and I had to remember the rest from my inspection of the crime scene.

  The Sheriff was quiet for a long time after I had finished telling him the true story of his son’s death.

  “Why Jaynie?” he asked, at length.

  “What?”

  “Jaynie Hooper. Fliss’s sister. Why’d those bastards kill her?”

  “She was an accidental victim,” I explained. “I was their intended target. The anciens, you see,” I added, “have been planning a Revolution on Belladonna for some time, as a way of breaking the link with Earth. Their first step towards that was to kill a Galactic Cop. They wanted to know, I guess, if they could.”

  “But they didn’t know you had a backup spaceship in orbit? And that you came back in a human body?”

  “No, they did not know any of that. The anciens all believe, even now, that the Galactic Cop is dead.”

  The Sheriff nodded. “So that’s why he died.”

  “I don’t follow your argument,” I said, puzzled.

  The Sheriff’s tone became sharper, almost angry. “That’s why they killed Alex, the way they did. They could, for Christ’s sake, have put a bullet in his head! Instead, they went and did their spooky Quantum Zen shit, knowing full well what kinda fucking shit-storm it would raise.”

  I realised what he was about to say; it shocked and alarmed me.

  “They knew we’d have to call it in to the SN Government,” snapped the Sheriff. “The quantum murder method, the mess they made of those bodies – that was all just their way of luring a Galactic Cop on to the planet. It was you they wanted. They wanted to kill you.”

  “I follow your argument. I suspect you are correct,” I acknowledged.

  “But why? These guys have enough power to take over the entire Universe. Why the big deal about killing a single fucking cyborg?”

  There was spittle, I noticed, on the Sheriff’s grey moustache; I resisted the urge to wipe it off.

  “I do not have any fully credible answers to that question,” I replied.

  The Sheriff was silent for a few moments. I could a
lmost see, in the grimness of his expression, the dark thoughts that were flickering through him.

  “I wish I didn’t know this,” he admitted.

  “That your son worked for the anciens?”

  “Yeah. I wish I didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I wish I’d never had a fucking child at all.”

  “Are you pulling out?”

  “Fuck no. All I’ve got left is revenge.”

  When the Sheriff had left, I felt hollow.

  I had come to this planet to solve the case: and now the case was solved. The motives were exposed, the truth had been outed. The job had been done.

  But, I thought to myself, so what? The mystery was solved; but the pain remains.

  And so my work continued: I spied on the anciens; I played to perfection the role of General Durer.

  And my criminal empire expanded with each passing day.

  The robot miners stopped and looked up at the sky, as the two flying cars swooped down. Torpedoes were fired from the pirate craft and flew through the air and exploded in the midst of the robots. Limbs flew. Then the bandits leaped out of the flying cars, heavily body-armoured, and ran towards the warehouses where the gold ingots were kept.

  I watched it all via my dragonflies, with bleak amusement.

  The bandits entered the warehouses and found – nothing. No gold. No diamonds. Instead, they were greeted with a holo image of me, standing in the middle of the empty building.

  They rained bullets at the holo but the bullets flew harmlessly through.

  Outside the warehouse, there was a huge explosion. The bandits ran outside – and saw their flying cars had been blown up.

  The holo of me sauntered out after them. “Long way home guys,” I said cheerfully.

  “Who the hell are you?” said one of the bandits.

  “I’m your new boss,” I explained.

  The whore’s name was Siam. He was a native Belladonnan with an Asian-Earth ancestry, possessed of a fragile beauty, with slender hands and beautiful, soulful eyes. Both his arms had been broken, and his eyes had been gouged out.