Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “Who did this to you?” I asked.

  “I don’t talk to the police,” Siam told me, wearily.

  “I’m not the police,” I told him. “I’m the guy who runs the gangs in this city.”

  “Who says so?”

  “I say so. These fucking Pimps are out of control, man! They’re hurting girls, and boys, and young herms. We don’t need this. So here’s the deal: I’ll provide the premises, you do your jobs, you pay me rent. Let’s leave it at that. And if anyone hurts you—”

  “The Pimps are augmented,” Siam said bitterly. “One of them’s a Gill’s Killer. You won’t be able to touch them.”

  “Who did this to you, Siam?”

  “You have a nice voice.”

  “Thank you, Siam.”

  “I’m more a companion, you know. Than a prostitute. Is that so very bad?”

  “That’s not so very bad,” I assured him.

  “They threatened to – you know. Make a eunuch of me. I have to pay them ninety per cent of my income. But some weeks, I don’t even work. I just like being – a companion. And people like me and they give me gifts. Is that so very bad?”

  “It’s really not so very bad, Siam.”

  “They called me a ‘whore’. It made me feel so vulgar. Now, I’m a blind whore. I don’t feel so good about myself these days.”

  “Just give me their names, tell me where to find them.”

  Siam was silent for a long time. Then he looked at me with sightless eyes.

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t want to,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Siam actually smiled. “Because you’re fighting over me. They beat me up, you beat them up. It makes me – meat. I’m not meat. I fight my own battles.”

  “You’re a seven-stone butterfly, Siam. You don’t have to fight battles. You don’t have to work for me. But I own the property where you live. You can pay me rent. The rest is up to you.”

  “You’re taking over the gangs, huh?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “You don’t stand a chance. These guys are augmented. They’ll wipe the floor with you.”

  “You need some help with this?” asked Sheriff Heath.

  “I reckon,” I said, with grim anticipation, “I can just about handle it.”

  “Is that him?”

  “That’s him,” said Shania. The Pimp looked across at her. He swaggered over to the table where I sat sinking whisky with Shania, the prostitute who had first told me about the anciens’ love of young flesh.

  “You’re one of mine aren’t you?” the Pimp sneered at Shania. He was tall, strongly muscled, with the eerie stillness that was typical of an augmented assassin. I guessed he had organic knives in his hands, and bulletproof skin.

  “The lady’s with me,” I said, calmly.

  “Only if you pay.”

  “Please leave us alone.”

  The Pimp stroked Shania’s cheek. I wondered if he’d been a Gill’s Killer.

  “Honey, what’s your name?”

  “Shania,” Shania whispered in fear.

  “Okay, I’ve had enough of this,” I said, and the Pimp had a knife at my throat with lightning-fast speed. I grabbed the blade and squeezed.

  The blade cracked and fell into pieces.

  I lunged out of my chair in a rage. But an instant later, the Pimp was gone.

  Shania looked around, baffled, before realising he wasn’t there. The Pimp had fled the bar in less than a second, with uncanny and augmented speed.

  “You let him go,” said Shania accusingly.

  I held out a hand. Cupped in my palm were the Pimp’s eyeballs.

  Five hours later, I found the Pimp in the City Hospital, trying to buy new eyeballs.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “Hey?” he retorted, turning towards me.

  I broke the Pimp’s neck. A nurse smiled at me. “I’m a civilian, okay?” she said.

  “Understood. I’m taking this, yeah?”

  I hoicked the Pimp’s body over my shoulder and walked out with it. I loaded the body into a flying car, and flew out of the city, into the wilderness. Then I used a laser to cut off the Pimp’s head. I buried the head twelve foot in the earth.

  The body I left out for the birds.

  I hated the Pimps. Not just because they were evil but because their evil was such a simple, tawdry thing.

  The Pimps had a single simple modus operandi: violent intimidation. They were extortionists, they were blackmailers, they were bullies. But they weren’t organised, they owned no properties, they ran no rackets.

  I was aware that these evil little shits were created by my own actions. For in the chaos after the Vice Wars, the Pimps had come into their own, like rats among the garbage. They weren’t even a single gang. There were about two hundred and fifty of them in all. Some of them used to work for Fernando Gracias, as assassins and armed robbers. Some of them were former Gill’s Killers. Some of them had been bodyguards to Kim Ji. Some of them were sadists employed by Hari Gilles to beat and partially flay willing punters.

  And now, they were a loose alliance of freelance criminals. In their first few months of operation, they had killed a dozen whores and crippled two dozen more; and from that moment, all the prostitutes and courtesans in Lawless City paid them money, every week. If they didn’t pay, they were killed.

  But the Pimps did nothing else – they didn’t find clients, or provide premises, or protect their whores against other extortionists. These Pimps didn’t even pimp: they just terrorised.

  The “Pimps,” I knew, also attacked gamblers, mugging them as they left the casinos and cutting off their arms, to obtain their credit chips. They burned down shops and then collected protection money from the other shop-owners. They raped the Vice-Chancellor of the City University, and all the students and dons were obliged to pay the Pimps a weekly fee, to avoid a similar trauma. They kidnapped an opera singer and threatened to cut out her larynx, and were paid a ransom by the singer’s manager and fans. They took money from the football teams, the ice-hockey teams, the baseball teams. Occasionally, the police tried to arrest the Pimps: but when twelve uniformed officers were found hanged and castrated in the City Square, the police decided to ease off on them.

  The Pimps were lowlifes, but in the days and weeks after the gang bosses had all died, they became the public face of organised crime in Lawless City.

  It took me three months to kill them all. I hunted them, stealthily. I broke into their houses. I poisoned their food. I knew – from hundreds of interviews, and from the film footage from my dragonflies – who the Pimps were, and where they lived. And so I executed them.

  And then, when there were only ten Pimps left alive, I challenged them all to a duel. Mano a mano, in the city’s gladiatorial arena.

  The challenge was accepted. The day of the Munera dawned. And I managed to find the eleven bombs they had concealed en route to kill me before I could fight.

  When I appeared in the arena, alive and well, the Pimps took one look, and panicked and fled.

  I followed them, and hunted them. Six of them died that same day; but it took me a week to find and kill the last four.

  And when that was done, my work was over. I was now the undisputed gang lord of Lawless City.

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Aretha said, goadingly.

  “I’m finding some satisfaction in my current role,” I conceded.

  “You have an entourage.”

  “Yes indeed,” I admitted.

  “People pay you protection money.”

  “Even better,” I said, basking.

  “Don’t get – you know—” said Aretha.

  “Get what?”

  “Too used to this.”

  I laughed. “It’s a means to an end, that’s all.”

  “You’re like an emperor. One boss, for all the rackets. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, the saloons, extortion,”

  “We don’t do extort
ion any more.”

  “Armed robbery. Assassination.”

  “We don’t do that either.”

  “If I arrested you, all crime would end.”

  “You know why I’m doing this Aretha. You know.”

  “Of course I know. I’m just kidding.”

  And then Aretha looked at me. She was pensive.

  And she was also, I realised, in a moment of overwhelming epiphany, beautiful.

  Extraordinarily, heart-touchingly, magnificently beautiful.

  But beautiful how? I wondered to myself. Beautiful why?

  Beautiful, I realised, not because of her physical attractiveness – for that was common enough in this day and age, and (though I was astute enough to never tell her this) there were plenty of women in Bompasso gifted with better looks and slimmer, more perfect bodies, than Aretha.

  No, she was beautiful because of something else: because her outer body was lit with a strange and wonderful inner life.

  It was a quality that I envied. I was aware that my humaniform body had good looks in abundance – girls often told me so, and some guys did too – but I knew I had no such “inner life.” When I looked at my own eyes in the mirror, I just saw blankness. It was why I was so feared: there was no trace of fear in my eyes. No trace of anything.

  “What are you thinking?” Aretha asked me.

  I did not reply.

  “Sing for me.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “I know who your daughter is. You’re her mother.”

  “Why do you want me here?”

  “It’s my club. I’m looking for singers. You’re broke, don’t deny it. No one else will give you a job, I saw to that. So you have to come here. It’s simple really. So – sing.”

  And Aretha’s mother Jara sang. She was small, mixed race, and moderately pretty. But in the course of several “chance” meetings over the last few weeks – and after following her and covertly eavesdropping upon her conversations on several more occasions – I had decided that she was a shallow and mean-spirited woman, prone to petty sarcasm and mindless chatter.

  But when she sang, she was a mythological beast, a bird flying high in the sky, a punch in the solar plexus from the woman you love.

  And I was filled with joy.

  I watched the gamblers, and was amused at their folly.

  The game of Hazard involved betting on the roll of a set of multi-dimensional dice. The dice were, of course, loaded, and remotely controlled, and lived entirely in this dimension.

  The dice flew. The gamblers roared with pleasure. The roulette wheels spun.

  All was risked; nothing was achieved.

  But the exhilaration in the faces of the gamblers filled me with a perverse delight.

  “Tell me about Fliss,” I said.

  “You know about her,” Macawley told me, defensively.

  “According to my database—”

  “You still talk like a fucking robot, you know that?”

  “Now, now,” I said mildly.

  “ ‘According to my database,’ ” mocked Macawley.

  “It’s where my memories are stored.”

  “Then you’ll remember what I said, the last time we spoke of Fliss.”

  “I was a previous Version then. And besides, I want to hear more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was – you loved her, didn’t you?”

  “As a friend.”

  “You loved her.”

  “I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone. Best pals. A special bond. So what do you want to know?” Macawley asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing. Not really. I know every fact there is to know about Fliss Hooper. But I just wonder – what made you love her?”

  Macawley shrugged. Her face radiated concern, confusion, tenderness.

  “You can’t say?”

  “It can’t be put into words.” Macawley shrugged again. “That’s what a shrug means.”

  “Body language,” I said. “I’m aware of the—”

  She waved her hand, meaning, “Shut up.” I shut up. She was lost in thought.

  “What are you—” I began to say, but she interrupted me, brusquely.

  “When I married my husband,” she said. “Boy! I was so fucking gullible. Everything he told me to do, I had to do it. He made fun of my looks. I’m part cat-person, well you know that obviously, but the point is, he made me depilate. It’s not like I have fur, just downy skin. But every night I left the sink full of clumps of golden hair, actual bits of my body I removed to please him. Why did I do that? How could have I been so dumb?”

  “You’re soliloquising, I like this,” I said.

  “I’d never fall for that kind of shit now. Never! I’d smell that kind of manipulative bastard a mile off. Now I depilate because – I don’t know why. It’s habit. But I’m proud of who I am. No one can tell me otherwise.”

  “All very interesting.”

  “You get my gist.”

  “You have a gist?” I said, taken aback.

  “Yeah I do. An agenda. Subtext. ‘Gist’. Capice?”

  “So what, pray,” I said, “was in fact the subtext of your engaging rant?”

  “I was a previous version, duh?”

  I was deeply shaken: it hadn’t dawned on me she knew me so very well.

  “Ah, yes I see,” I said grudgingly. “It’s good to know your rambling comments do sometimes have a point.”

  “The longer I live,” Macawley explained, “the more I change. Even at my age – I mean – I’m like hundreds of years younger than you, a person can change so much. I’ve been bisexual, asexual, I used to be an alcoholic, but that wasn’t so good, not with an accelerated metabolism like mine. I’m smart, I could have been a surgeon. I did two years in medical school and I was fucking good at it, but I decided I didn’t want to change that much. Doctors get hard and cold, you see, and addicted to sarcasm, and they have no social life. I wanted to be more me.”

  “I envy you.”

  “Of course you envy me. You’re a dead human in the body of a robot.”

  “I envy you your ability to choose your path in life.”

  “I guess.”

  “Free will. You have free will.”

  “Do I?” asked Macawley.

  “How do you operate this thing?” I asked.

  “Sit on it. It’s a horse. It’s trained to be ridden,” Aretha explained.

  “Why not a flybike?”

  “I thought this was more romantic.”

  “Romantic?”

  “Just kidding. You’re not capable of appreciating romance, you dumb fucking robot.”

  “Easy now. You are, according to the ancient nomenclature, my ‘moll,’ ” I said, teasingly.

  “You love it, don’t you? The power. Being the gang lord,” Aretha told me.

  “Hell yes,” I conceded.

  Aretha and I rode the two horses into the wilderness, across rugged terrain and through bleak yellow hills. We both rode bareback, and I had to be cautious not to press too hard with my knees in case I shattered my horse’s ribs.

  The ride was rough and fast and furious. Aretha was a natural horsewoman, and passing cowboys stared at us with horror as we galloped our steeds into a frenzy.

  After a while we stopped by a lake, and let the horses drink, and rubbed them down. They were augmented horses, they would never tire and never collapse. I felt a surge of connection. For a few hours I and the horse had existed as a single being, like a mythological centaur.

  Aretha drank water greedily from a canteen, and I envied her that desperate, needing-to-be-slaked thirst.

  “Good?” I asked.

  “Good,” she said, wiping her wet chin with the back of her hand.

  “I didn’t know you liked the outdoors,” I commented.

  “My father used to bring me out here. Before he died,” Aretha said.

  I nodded. “What was he like?” I asked.
r />   Aretha shrugged. I interpreted that to imply that she would answer the question, but not until she had paused for a few moments to build up the suspense.

  Those moments passed.

  “A big man,” said Aretha. “Calm. Dangerous. He loved kids. He was a lot like you.”

  “I don’t love kids.”

  “He was a killer. Even when he held me in his arms, I knew that. He killed men, and he enjoyed killing men.”

  “How like me? I fail to comprehend.”

  She stared at me, with withering contempt. And then I understood, though I didn’t concur; for I did not enjoy killing. It was merely—

  “There’s something you need to understand,” she said. “I have two young daughters.” She paused again. There was a whisper of moisture in Aretha’s eye: I observed it, and wondered at it. “But for the past five years, since they were babies,” she continued, “they’ve lived with my sister. I’m afraid, you see. There was a spate of cops having their kids kidnapped. I’ve had death threats from criminals, and just as many from my colleagues. I’m not corrupt enough, you see? I threaten their cosy way of life. And they know that if they true-kill my kids, that would break my heart.

  “So I had to make a choice. The job or my children. Guess which I chose?”

  “That’s very sad. But I can offer them protection.”

  “No you can’t!” Aretha said fiercely. “We have to keep them away from us, from you. Until all this over, until it’s safe.”

  “And that is what this is about? This display of emotion?” I said, in what I hoped was a kind way.

  “I’m – trying to explain something to you,” Aretha said. She was, I noted, almost hysterical at a deep emotional level, but was controlling it impressively. “All the things we’re doing now,” Aretha continued, “I’m doing them for my kids. I want my kids back. I can’t live on a godforsaken lawless planet any more, and I can’t keep not living with my kids. So I have to end the crime. The corruption. The shit. That’s what I’m about.”